Silently, MSI has listed the product page for its X99S SLI Krait Edition motherboard. The idea behind the Krait series of motherboards is that they feature a plain black and white design, which is a color scheme that is popular in the themed PC building community.
The X99S SLI Krait Edition motherboard is, aside from the color scheme, similar to the original X99S SLI Plus, which received a lot of good feedback in reviews, so you can rest assured that it's a good board. On top of it, however, it has a more elaborate power delivery circuit with 12 phases and dedicated "Audio Boost" sound hardware. It is built with the Military Class 4 components.
At the center of it the X99S SLI Krait Edition is an LGA 2011-3 socket, which is wired to eight DDR4 slots for quad-channel memory. Additionally, you'll find four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots, one SATA-Express port (which can be used as two SATA ports, too), eight additional SATA ports, and a Turbo M.2 slot. It has hardware support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays.
Rear I/O connectivity is handled by eight USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a legacy PS/2 port, and the audio jacks (which are gold-plated), and there's an optical TOSLINK output.
If you've been looking to build a black-and-white themed system, but found Asus' X99 Deluxe board a bit too expensive at $400, this one might just be for you. MSI hasn't announced pricing or availability yet, but we'd expect it to be priced between $250 and $300.
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