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First thing that we will always look at is the room around the CPU. This board does in fact have the 4 holes around the socket that are commonly used in water cooling setups. There's plenty of room for you to use larger heatsinks.

Second thing we always take a look at is the placement of the ATX power connector. This has been placed to the left of the CPU socket, between the CPU and the PS2 ports. This is not a wise design since you do not want the ATX Connector is in a place where the power cable will go directly over your CPU fan. You'll have to be careful with this and try a few different things to keep this from obstructing your airflow. This is rather bad placement on MSI's part. At least it's near the top of the board and isn't too hard to tuck in above the CPU heatsink.

The northbridge is actively cooled with a transparent fan unlike the usual black heatsink with a generic little fan on it.

Something we always have to look for on a board is the fan headers. Four fan headers seems to be the standard for boards nowadays and that is exactly what we found. They have been put into nice locations with two by the DIMMs near the CPU, one in use by the Northbridge fan, and the final one down by the promise RAID connectors.

The AGP slot has a retention clip for locking your AGP card into place. You will hear it click into place when your graphics card is fully inserted. Even I have a problem with graphics cards being seated properly in cheaper cases.

The IDE connectors for the VIA onboard controller are to the right of the 3 DIMM slots. This is always a good place to have them. It helps keep those cables out of the way and helps maintain good airflow. The Promise RAID controllers 2 IDE connectors are tucked away down at the bottom of the board in an ideal place for all cases which have a hard drive rack down there. All 5 drive connectors are nice and out of the way.

Down towards the bottom of the board you will see a series of headers. Two for the 4 USB 2.0 connections and 1 header for 2 USB 1.1 ports that are on the riser with the DLED debugging system. one of the 2 USB 2.0 ports is covered by a blue sticker that says it's for a bluetooth device. There haven't been any bluetooth devices coming my way yet so I am unable to test this feature.

Additonal Features

We were of course sent the fully loaded ARU version of this motherboard. What does the ARU mean? Basically MSI sells this board with different features that are optional. The A stands for audio. This board has great 6.1 channel audio onboard complete with digital optical output! The R means ATA 133 RAID. Abit has standardized this feature in high end motherboards. The U is a VERY nice addition. It's USB 2.0 and 4 added USB ports complete with USB 2.0 support.

Overclocking

Looking at this board on paper it looks like this board has everything that we need!