MSI’s Z87 MPower MAX poses for a picture

Intel’s Haswell is less than a month away and will be launching on 4 June 2013 as the doors for Computex Taipei 2013 open to allow a flood of some of the biggest nerds in the IT industry to gawk at what others are working on.

Some motherboard manufacturers have had their products leak (unintentionally or intentionally, who knows) and lately we’ve seen boards from ASRock strike a pose but nothing from it’s other competitor, MSI. EgyptHardware managed to get hold of the upcoming Haswell-compatible MPower MAX motherboard, though, and what a beauty it is.

: MSI Z87 MPower MAX front

: MSI Z87 MPower MAX ports

: MSI Z87 MPower MAX OC buttons

It looks like MSI is trying to imitate the ASRock Z87 OC Formula with the black-and-yellow colour scheme and even has the same set of buttons for easy overclocking using on-screen controls, although rather oddly these are located at the bottom of the motherboard.

In the pictures we can also see their in-house audio chip, called Audio Blast, that should deliver a swift kicking to the Realtek audio chips we’ve been suffering with for years. The I/O panel on the board is well featured – there’s just two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0. Gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, Displayport, audio, and optical outputs.

A welcome addition is the CMOS reset button on the back. That’ll make recovering from a bad overclock much easier without reaching into the chassis and fiddling with the CMOS button.

Although it’s zoomed out, one can clearly see the two massive heatsinks with yellow striping, ten SATA 6GB/s ports (the red sticker warning is probably about using the mSATA slot in the middle of the board), four DDR3 slots and dual 8-pin PEG connectors for delivering extra power to the CPU. The layout is clean and functional, although you’ll be better suited to running dual graphics because of the PCI-Express slot placements.

EgyptHardware took down their post, but Tom’s Hardware saved the snaps for posterity.