The platform is ready to hold any of Intel's Haswell central processing units

Aug 14, 2014 09:53 GMT  ·  By

Many of the motherboards covered this week were X99 chipset-based monsters designed for the upcoming extreme performance Haswell-E central processing units, but most consumers won't get within a mile of them, which means that Z97-based ones are still the way to go.

Well, somewhat. The fact is that motherboards powered by the Z97 chipset are pretty overpowered, and by extension, expensive as sin.

The Z97 chipset is the one made for the best “normal” Haswell chips you see, the Core i3/i5/i7 units from Intel's portfolio.

Those chips can cost around a thousand dollars/euro, meaning that no one is going to waste time making a low-end Z97 mainboard, especially since the core-logic is particularly geared towards overclocking.

This is definitely the case for the new MSI Z97 SLI Krait Edition. The mainboard is not actually up for sale anywhere yet, but Micro-Star International should release it soon.

What immediately stands out about this product is the color scheme: black and white. Many gaming-grade motherboards have a red+black color theme, while others just try to enhance the “traditional” colors associated with a brand (like blue for Gigabyte).

MSI decided to step outside the realm of conventions for once, so it painted the PCB (printed circuit board) of the Z97 SLI Krait Edition mostly black, with just some slots and part of the heatsinks rendered pure white.

It's eye-catching through the mere fact of being so unusual, which was the whole point. As for the specifications, they are about what you would expect from an ATX mainboard like this one.

The LGA 1150 socket is wired to four DDR3 slots, for one. You should be able to install 32 GB or even 64 GB if you really want to.

Another thing to note is the pair of SATA 6.0 Gbps ports. Might seem like a small number, until you notice the SATA Express port (10 Gbps instead of 6 Gbps) and the M.2 SSD port (unclear if it's SATA- or PCI Express-wired, so performance can be of 6 Gbps or 1.8 GB/s).

7.1 channel audio is present as well, along with Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of PCI Express x16 slots, Du-Sub, and HDMI.

All in all, the MSI Z97 SLI Krait Edition is definitely a good high-end gaming motherboard, even though it has a simpler design than most competitors. Unfortunately, the price and ETA (estimated time of arrival) are still very much under wraps.