Although details about MSI's Eclipse Plus leaked out some time ago, the first picture of the actual board has only just surfaced thanks to our friend over at Syndrome-OC. This is one of the first X58 motherboards to feature the Nvidia Nforce 200 chipset which should according to Nvidia enable better SLI performance.

The board itself looks rather catching with a black/blue design. MSI has gone for the oh so fashionable low-profile heatsinks that Asus stared using on its R.O.G. series of boards. MSI seems to be targeting gamers with this board as it's labelled as a gaming series product.

With four x16 PCIe slots you should be able to run most SLI configurations on this board, although if you're using dual slot cards you'll be limited to using three of the four slots. The board also has two PCIe x1 slots and a single PCI slot.

Around the back you'll find two PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, dual eSATA and Gigabit Ethernet, a single FireWire port, a clear CMOS button and a two digit diagnostics LED display. The board also features an internal D-LED2 display, a range of onboard buttons, 10 SATA connectors, two headers for an additional four USB 2.0 ports and a header for one more FireWire port. The board does of course have six memory slots for triple-channel DDR3.

As there are no audio connectors we'd expect MSI to ship a PCIe x1 audio riser, most likely with an X-Fi chip on it which would go in the top most PCIe x1 slot. No pricing or official release date has been revealed as yet and it seems like we'll have to wait a bit longer to get the full details on this board.?

You can find a higher resolution image and some more details here (in French)