[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look
The X99S SLI PLUS features an all black PCB and pretty much all black everything where possible. This should be a welcome feature to most considering buying this board as it means it should go with any colour theme they may have in mind.
Looking in a bit closer and we can see the massive 2011-3 CPU socket smack dab in the middle of the 8x DDR4 DIMM slots which can support DDR4 in quad channel mode up to 3333MHz in OC mode, truly amazing. Along the top is uniquely designed mosfet heatsink which is also blocking the 8-pin CPU power connector. Having a look around we can also notice part of the rear IO, some fan headers, the front panel USB3.0 header and the 24-pin power connector.
Moving on down to the bottom and the fun continues with the 4x PCI-Ex16 that support quad SLI/CrossFire which will give users the ultimate in performance when it comes to graphics if fully utilized. In between some of the PCI-Ex16 slots are the 2x PCI-Ex1 slots and we can also see the CMOS battery and M.2 port.
Moving on down to the very bottom of the motherboard and this is where the normal array of ports and headers are. This is also where users will find the OC Genie button that once pushed will give your PC a slight overclock in an almost unnoticeable amount of time on its next start up. The power and reset buttons will also come in handy for overclocking and mean that users will not have to plug a front panel power button into the motherboard to turn it on, something that was very helpful in my testing personally.
This is only the 2nd time I have ran into this issue but installing the X99S SLI PLUS into my Corsair Carbide 540 Air case I was unable to plug the power button into the motherboard and it comes down to two reasons. One, MSI have moved the front panel header more towards the centre of the board rather than its normal spot in the bottom right hand side, if looking at the image below the bottom most right header is the JFP1 header and this is where you would need to plug in the some of the front panel connectors. Issue number two could come down to the fact that Corsair has made the length of the cable from the front panel power button ridiculously short, either way it would be easily fixed with an extender if need be but for this review I just used the onboard power button on the X99S SLI PLUS.
On the right hand side of the bottom of the board is where users will find 2 x USB2.0 headers the SATA Express port which if you notice right above it is a little switch which allows users to switch between two separate BIOS, very handy when overclocking as you can have one set to standard and stable bios, flip the switch and proceed to overclock and in the event anything goes wrong you can go back to the original BIOS with nothing to worry about.
Not that it has any real significant meaning, I just thought I would share a photo of the CPU in the socket as it sits upside down! This is no way effects anything other than some individuals OCD.
Just a bit closer look at the mosfet heatsink in all of it’s glory, the pictures don’t really do  it much justice but for some reason when I was taking the rest of the photos something convinced me to take a couple shots of it as well.
