Yellow is the new red
The MSI Z77 MPower looks cool. It comes entirely in black, with yellow accents on the heatsinks.The MPower has three PCI-Express x16 slots, with a total of 16 lanes. The other configurations are 16/0/0, 8/8/0 and 8/4/4. The latter is not possible with Sandy Bridge processors, and the third x16 slot can't be used with those processors. The board also has four PCI-Express x1 slots.
Internally you'll only find the six SATA ports from the Z77 chipset, and there is no eSATA. MSI decided against adding extra SATA controller chips. There are eight USB 3.0 ports, six of which are external. You also get eight USB 2.0 ports. The board has a single Gigabit LAN port, based on the familiar Realtek RTL8111E controller, an onboard WLAN controller (802.11n, 150 Mbit/s) and Bluetooth.
It's possible to connect two monitors to the integrated GPU, via HDMI and DisplayPort. MSI includes the Lucid Virtu software for making dedicated and integrated graphics processors work together. A Realtek ALC898 codec provides 7.1 audio, and is combined with THX TruStudio Pro software. There is digital audio output.
