If there's one thing you'll notice about Intel's latest Core i7 technology and its supporting hardware, it's the price: the processors themselves and the motherboards to fit them into aren't exactly cheap.

MSI's latest motherboard supporting the new technology, the X58 Pro, aims to take some of the pain away by being priced to undercut the opposition by around forty quid, so as to make a system based on the cheapest i7 CPU, the 920, seem almost affordable.

The feature list of the X58 Pro isn't as long as some of its competitors but this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as most of the time all the extra goodies lay dormant in the box anyway and if it means MSI can offer the board at a sensible price, so much the better.

The board is neatly laid out with plenty of space around the components, including the Socket 1366, allowing for larger, third party CPU coolers to be used. Both the Intel X58 North and the ICH10-R South Bridges, along with the MOSFETS, are passively cooled.

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The Northbridge cooler looks tiny in comparison to the ones used on competitors' boards and, although it didn't get too hot under test conditions, you may want to sort out your case's internal air flow if you start thinking about overclocking.

One annoying feature of the layout is the positioning of the three headers for case fans. Two headers sit behind the primary graphics card slot and will be extremely difficult to access if you have a full size graphics card. Similarly, the third header sits to the front of the second slot, and again there is a good chance it will be blocked by a large card.

Six DIMM slots are provided which support DDR3 1600 (OC)/1333/1066 and 800MHz in triple channel configuration up to a maximum supported memory of 24GB.

The board supports two full x16 speed PCI-E 2.0 graphics slots for CrossFireX support and there is a third x16 graphics slot, but this is limited to four lanes of bandwidth.

Although out of the box the board only supports CrossFire, you may (at your own risk) want to try to flash the BIOS with the one from the X58 Pro's SLI-supporting sibling, the X58 Pro SLI and, if all goes well, you'll have a board that supports both CrossFireX and SLI. In addition to these slots you get two standard SLI slots and a pair of x1 PCI-E slots place above and below the first x16 slot.

Six SATA 3.0GB/s ports are supported by the Southbridge and all are RAID capable. All six ports are edge-mounted at ninety degrees on the board which helps make for tidy cable runs. A seventh SATA port is positioned just behind the six and is independently controlled by a JMircon JMB363 chip.

Should you have a multitude of USB devices, then fear not, as the X58 Pro supports up to ten ports, six via the back I/O panel with motherboard headers for the other four. A single eSATA port and FireWire port join them on the panel and there is a motherboard header for a second Firewire port if you need it.

Eight channel audio is provided by an integrated Realtek ALC888S chip which also supports the optical S/PDIF port on the rear panel, the same company providing the controller for the single Gigabit Ethernet connection.

MSI's X58 is, at the time of writing, the cheapest X58 motherboard on the market. Its low price may mean that it is a little feature-light compared to its more expensive rivals, but you do get all the basics and for many of us that's all we want. If you want to use the board as a basis for some serious overclocking, though, then you may need extra cooling on the chipsets.