MSI P45 Platinum

The board itself, is quite impressive looking. It's very colourful with blues, greens, oranges and even some purple thrown onto the palette.

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On the left of the board you have 2 PCI-e 16x slots, with 2 PCI-e 1x slots in between and a couple of old school PCI ports thrown in for good measure.

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Interestingly, next to the PCI-e 16x 1 slot, is a molex connector. This allows you to power something, be it a case fan or an aftermarket GPU cooler without routing a cable from your PSU. While these connectors are used less and less these days, this kind of thing can help with cable management and therefore improve air flow throughout the case.

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At the front end are 6 side mounted SATA connectors, alongside a single IDE port. Ones added to the side like this again aid cable management, though it makes setting up a little bit harder as plugging cables into the top connector makes it more difficult to plug in the "bottom" ones. There are also 2 extra SATA connectors, I guess for those that really don't like side mounted SATA ports; for some reason.

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The cooling for this board is made up for 4 stages, the first covers the south bridge and is a simple copper heatsink, with two heatpipes running through it.

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Following the heatpipes along, you reach the odd looking heatsink(s) that sit atop the large northbridge chipset. Each heatsink has a heatpipe that runs through it, two connect to the southbridge and the other three (central and 2 most left in picture) have attached heatpipes that follow along to the PWM heatsink.

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