Just a few days ahead of Intel's LGA2011 Sandy Bridge E launch, MSI has let loose some pictures of its high-end X79 motherboard, the MSI Big Bang XPower II.

Featuring an eyecatching all-black design, the new Big Bang XPower II boasts impressive specs that you would expect from such a high-end motherboard. MSI decided to go for an ammo/gatling-gun heatsink design that looks somewhat like the one seen on Gigabyte's G1 models but we were told that MSI decided to go for full metal design and has assured us that those aren't plastic details. It's hard to talk about the looks of the motherboard as you either like it or don't and it is as simple as that.

As for the tech specs, the MSI Big Bang XPower II feature 24+4-phase VRM design with high-end Military Class III components like solid-chokes, driver-MOSFETs, High-C POSCAP capacitors. In addition to the regular 24-pin MB connector, the new motherboard will draw power from two 8-pin EPS ones, as well as the additional 6-pin PCI-Express one used for graphics part. The rest of the specs include a total of eight DDR3 memory slots, four on each side of the LGA2011 socket, seven PCI-Express slots, and we are still not sure about the lane configuration as MSI might decided to go for the bridge chip that gives it additional lanes.

The specs and feature list continues with a total of six SATA 6.0Gbps ports and four SATA 3.0Gbps ones, eight USB 3.0 ports (four from internal headers), dual Gigabit Ethernet, bunch of USB 2.0 ports and FireWire one, X-Fi MB2 integrated audio, and bunch of overclocking friendly features like on-board OC, power, reset and clear CMOS buttons, voltage measurement points, OC Genie, and Multi-BIOS.

Of course, we still need to wait for Intel to give a green light but we are quite sure that we'll hear more about this top-notch motherboard.