 Welcome to my proper unboxing of the MSI Big Bang M-Power. This is a Z77 motherboard that changes the game of overclocking. And I'm actually sort of on board with what they're doing here. So, it has a three-year warranty. It's got all the usual Z77 features including support for the latest Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors on LGA 1155, Windows 7. Oh, and Windows 8 compatible. There's that new logo right there. AMD Crossfire, Nvidia SLI are supported. Virtue MVP is also supported, which means you've got things like their virtual v-sync as well as performance boost. I haven't had that much experience with it being compatible with a wide variety of different titles, but hey, if you find out that it works for the games that you play, then great. Enhanced components. So, you've got their driver MOSFETs. You've got their OCPCB. That's an interesting thing to call it. Solid caps, super ferrite chokes, Hi-C caps. Great. So, this is all their usual military class 3 stuff. Hybrid digital power. Interesting. Enhanced PWM design with hybrid digital power. Designed for overclocking on K-SKU CPUs. So, yes, overclockable CPUs. 8-pin power for the CPU with a 6-pin auxiliary power for video cards. These are useful and I prefer a 6-pin to a Molex just because these days I hardly have any Molexes in my system and it's hard to like write one up there. Enhanced thermals. Okay, TwinFrozer 4 based design. Interesting. Total fan control with all 4-pin PWM fan connectors on board. You can customize them in the BIOS or in Windows and monitor and record all the fan speeds. You've got your V-check points so you can actually use a multimeter to check your voltages because software based ones are not useful. Multi-BIOS 2. This has saved my bacon at least once before. Easy buttons. Onboard power and reset. Clear CMOS button on the back and a debug LED. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are included as well as SATA 3.6 gigabit per second. You know what? All this information is stuff that we could see by just opening up the board. So I'm sort of done with the outside of the box for now. Here's an overclocking guide. Very cool to have something like that included. Neat stuff. Okay, next we've got the I.O. Shield for SATA 3.6 gigabit per second cables, although it doesn't really make a difference. Antenna for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi presumably. Cool. Alright, we've got flexible black SLI bridge, my very favorite kind, and connectors to make those front panel connectors a little bit easier to do. Driver's disc, quick installation guide, certificate of quality and stability. Now, actually, I'm going to set this aside and we are going to talk about it more later. Software and applications user's guide, motherboard user's guide, and V-checkpoint cables so that you can actually plug something into them. Alright, motherboard itself. Okay, I haven't even gotten into what's good about this board yet, you guys. This is a very, very exciting board for one particularly important reason, and that is the gorgeous matte black PCB. No, that's not actually it. So the matte black PCB is good, but let's talk about what makes this board special. So, this certificate of quality and stability. We've seen this with products before. However, MSI has really stepped up their game with the M-Power being OC certified. That's the terminology they're using here. OC certified, performance power, and PWM cooling. However, they really take it to the next level. Check this out. Military class burn-in test. Every single board, that means this board, the board you buy, the board your friend buys, has gone through strict tests to guarantee stable overclocking results. So, they actually take every board, they install a CPU liquid cooler, which means the PWM is not getting any particular incidental airflow from their test bench. They overclock a K-Series CPU to 4.6 GHz or more, depending on the CPU. Not every test platform is exactly the same. So, a real overclock, like not, you know, an OC Genie overclock, like a real overclock. Then they put it in an unrealistically high temperature environment, and they run Prime95 to beat the snot out of the CPU at that overclock setting for 24 hours plus. Crazy, right? Every single board is overclocking validated with an overclocked CPU. The odds of getting a dud M-Power board is basically nil, because every single board is hand-tested. That doesn't happen on regular motherboards. Very, very cool stuff. Really stepping up their game right now, these MSI guys. Alright, so let's cover the layout. There's your LGA1155 socket, lots of room around it for big coolers, 8-pin CPU connectors in its ideal location at the top left. You got your 4 DDR3 slots supporting dual channel memory. You've also got your onboard power connectors. This is my new favorite spot for them. There's your OC Genie, your reset and your power, because once you've got a bunch of cards installed, it's kind of hard to reach the ones that are down here or around here. 24-pin power connector in its ideal location. There's the auxiliary 6-pin for your graphics cards, as well as your V-checkpoints for checking the voltages. There's your post-debug LED, and again, this is my new favorite location for this. The onboard USB 3 headers at a right angle on the right-hand edge of the board. Perfect. SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second. 4 SATA 2, 3 gigabit per second ports. There's your multi-bios switch to switch between the two physical bios chips. Got a couple front USB 2 ports, a couple headers, normal ones, and you've also got a high-powered one for charging things like an iPad. You've got a high-duty bandwidth allocation limitation, strongly recommended. You want to use an Ivy Bridge processor if you're going to use this bottom slot. Otherwise, these ones will run at PCIe 2, 8x, 8x with a Sandy Bridge, or PCIe 3, 8x, 8x with an Ivy Bridge chip. This is a fully PCIe board, so you've got 4 PCIe 1x slots and then 3 PCIe 16x slots. However, physically, they're 16 or 8x, 8x, 4x. And this 4 runs off the chipset, so it's not as good of a 4. So basically, this is a dual-card board. Moving right along to... This is actually... I think this is the best matte black PCB I've yet seen. Slick's giving me the thumbs up because it's so clean. Like, you can hardly even see the traces. It just looks like if I change the angle a little bit, you can see the traces sometimes, probably, but then other times you can. It's like very stealthy-looking. Let's have a look at the TwinFurzer 4-inspired cooler. So it's got a very neat shape to it that actually gives it a lot of surface area, even though you can't see a lot of it. And it's using a nice, thick heat pipe. I think MSI's branding for this used to be SuperPipe, but I haven't seen them really use that lately. Check it out. Phase LEDs. So you can see how many of your 12 power phases are active on the CPU at any given time. So when you're doing something intensive, those are going to crank up to the top, and when you're not, they're going to stay right down near the bottom, which is kind of neat stuff. Because when you're not consuming a lot of power, fewer power phases being active is actually more efficient. So there you go. You learned something today. Unless you already knew that, in which case you didn't learn something today. Alright, let's have a look at the back I.O. You got your PS2 port. I still like to see that. Two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, your Bluetooth, your Wi-Fi, gigabit ethernet is built in, display port and HDMI to handle your audio or your video out. Remember guys, you can use the onboard video here for your video transcoding functionality, and you can use your dedicated graphics card for gaming. You've got optical audio out as well as 7.1 audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Z77M Power from MSI. And I think...slick, slet...I can't have my phone right there. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. And don't forget the most important thing about this board. Hand tested. You want a board that works 100%? Okay, I can't say 100%, but 99.99% it will work if you buy one because it's hand tested.