Also, it's good to see that the entire motherboard will be cooled passively. MSI applies their SuperPipe cooling that we know from the GD65, but this time it has a larger heatsink that has to cover the phase VRMs. MSI uses a really thick 8mm heatpipe for great cooling efficiency.

Check it out, two x1 PCIe slots, three physical x16 PCIe graphics slots (rev 2.0). Now since typically the chipset/cpu combo only allows for x16 PCIe lanes, MSI added a Hydra chip to the motherboard. The chip also adds more PCI Express lanes to the motherboard so full x16 bandwidth can be supplied to the available PCI Express slots. It will connect with 16 PCIe lanes to the motherboard allowing you to go for 2-way / 3-way multi-GPU setups by coneecting two x16 links to a pair of GPUs.

We learned that there are three versions of the Hydra 200 available: the LT22114, the LT22102 and the LT22114. The only difference between the chips are the number of PCIe lanes. The lowest end chip has a x8 connection to the CPU/PCIe controller and two x8 connections to GPUs. Then the midrange LT22102 has a x16 connection to the CPU and two x16 connections for GPUs. And the highest end solution, the one being used on the MSI board, has a x16 to the CPU and then a configurable pair of x16s to GPUs. You can operate this controller in 4 x8 mode, 1 x16 + 2 x8 or 2 x16.

On the motherboard we'll spot chips from VIA, VT6315N, a FireWire/IEEE 1394a controller that runs on the PCI-Express bus and we spot the Realtek RTL8111DL for Gigabit LAN and a Realtek ALC 889A 8-channel HD controller. Yeah, that's a pretty looking hardcore overclocking raving piece of machinery alright.