The first pictures of MSI's upcoming P45 Diamond motherboard have appeared over at HKEPC and it looks like a strange beast. Not only does it come pre-fitted with a watercooling setup for the chipset, but it also has some rather extravagant heatpipes cooling the ICH10R and the MOSFET's.

It's a fairly feature packed board, as with past Diamond products from MSI, although it seems to have a fairly basic slot configuration compared to what we're used to seeing on top of the range products form MSI. The board has a pair of x16 PCIe 2.0 slots, of course limited to x8 bandwidth due to chipset limitations, two PCIe x1 slots and two PCI slots.

Judging by the color of the memory slots, this is a DDR3 board. MSI has also fitted eight SATA ports, two eSATA ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of PS/2 ports, eight rear USB 2.0 ports with headers for a further six, a FireWire port with a header for one additional port, and a rear CMOS reset button along with power and reset buttons on the motherboard itself.

As there's no onboard audio, we'd expect this motherboard to ship with the same Creative X-Fi PCIe sound card as MSI's other Diamond boards. What we're not too happy about is the fact that MSI has gone for a six-phase PWM design, which isn't what we'd expect to see on a top-of-the-range motherboard these days.

You can find the pictures of the board here