MSI shows Anniversary motherboard with unknown chipset

MSI shows a large part of its recently announced motherboards at Computex. It seemed that the company had run out of news for the stock market, but a motherboard on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary seems to hold a surprise.

The motherboard hung on the wall between the other high-end boards with Intel’s Z170 chipset, but the accompanying text board, where once again the most important specifications can be found, was suspiciously empty. Only the name Z2TO Anniversary and an introduction date, November 2016, were on the sign.

The company is not allowed to say anything about it, but it seems likely that it is an early model of a motherboard for Intel’s upcoming generation of processors codenamed Kaby Lake. This includes a new chipset, which, given the recent name developments, will probably be called Z270.

Not much is known about the motherboard yet, except for the specs that we can see. The board obviously has a 1151 socket for the processor, four DDR4 memory slots, two M2 slots, three PCIe-x16 slots and four x1 slots. We do not know which chipset will be hidden under the heatsink, but it provides at least two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 headers, six SATA600 ports and a U2 port. On the I/O shield are an additional three USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB 3.1 port with a type-a connector and a second with a type-c connector, audio ports, a gigabit network port, displayport and two HDMI to find ports.

A few highlights of other boards were the X99A Godlike Gaming Carbon, a motherboard for socket lga2011 processors and finished with carbon fiber accents and the Titanium series, which have silver or titanium-colored heatsinks. The latter series was already announced last week, but we could only now see it live.