The motherboard itself is wrapped in a clear static bag.  I personally prefer the old-school silver static bags though, but functionally, they are equal.  I'm just being picky.

Nice dark-brown PCB not only looks different, but draws heat from components and dissipates it more effectively than a green board.

From afar, the board has a nice, simple and clean layout. 

The rear panel shows the multitude of connections the board has to offer.  8x USB 2.0 ports, 2x USB 3.0 ports, analog audio jacks, SPDIF coax and TOSLINK jacks, Ethernet, a CMOS reset button, and a combo PS/2 keyboard and mouse port.  The CMOS button seems like it might be accidentally pressed, but when it sits behind the I/O shield, the button is recessed.  No eSATA ports here.  

As for slots, we have 4x PCIe x1, 2x PCIe x16, and a PCI-33.  I would have placed the two topmost PCIe x1 slots beneath the lower PCIe x16 so as not to block the PCI-33 if a second double-slot graphics card is used. 

The bottom edge of the board shows the location of various internal connectors.  Here, we have the audio, RS232 and USB 2.0.

More connectors - the TPM, SPI, and front panel pins.

Here we have the 6x SATA ports, nicely placed at the edge, horizontally-facing, and in white.  The color of the connectors makes a difference when trying to correctly plug in SATA cables in the dark depths of your PC case. 

The four DDR3 DIMM slots are nicely colored, blue and black, to match the rest of the board.  The lighter blue makes inserting DIMMs easier, when finding the location of the notch.  Also, the ATX power connector is well-placed at the edge of the board.  Most importantly, the locking notch of the power connector is correctly facing outward, not inward - where fingers will interfere with DIMMs when trying to manipulate the thick ATX power harness.

Yes, MILITARY CLASS!  The beefy heatsink provides cooling to the CPU's power regulator components underneath.  Elegantly designed with its slits aligned to airflow coming from the CPU fan.

Southbridge chips cooled by its own heatsink here.  Close proximity to the 6 Gbps SATA ports minimizes signal noise and errors.  Note the two fan headers which can be used for case cooling, RAM cooling, or southbridge cooling.

Here, the 890FX sits beneath a separate, MSI-logo'd heatsink.  Crucial design decision here to not thermally connect this heatsink with the power regulator heatsink using heatpipes, which other motherboards typically employ.  Separate cooling prevents parasitic warming of cooler components from warmer ones.

The latest and greatest iteration of USB is here - USB 3.0.  MSI saves you a PCIe x1 slot and around $30 by integrating the NEC ASIC on the motherboard.

Best of all, we have the components that matter most in stability:  Power delivery and regulation.  Here, MSI uses solid capacitors throughout the board.  Although they are still round and silver, these caps have no liquid electrolyte which can leak, bubble, or cause an mini-explosion.  Some of you may recall the vomiting capacitors of the late 90s, early 2000s, causing failures in all kinds of computer and electronic products.  That epidemic was caused by bad electrolyte formulas.  Secondly, the dark gray monoliths  beside the solid caps are the inductors which MSI calls "Icy chokes".  The outer shell dissipates heat, reducing operating temperatures.  Lastly, the flat SMD capacitors beside the round solid caps are tantalum capacitors.  Tantalum provide higher dielectric constant 'k' than other materials, improving its capacitive performance.  Tantalum capacitors are very precise in filtering noise and stabilizing voltage. 

All these component selection decisions made by MSI are overkill for casual computer users.  But when gamers, enthusiasts and power users put their PCs to heavy workloads, voltage and currents can spike and dip, as well as temperature fluctuations,  all affect system stability and reliability.  Eventually, poorly filtered DC power or noise introduced into any digital signal will inevitably produce errors.  Some errors may not be obvious to the user, as internal ECC mechanisms will catch and correct those.  However, each error will result in a slowing of data processing.  Accumulated errors will cause retries, and may eventually produce a STOP error, or BSOD. 

Next, let's look at the BIOS of the 890FXA-GD65.  This is one other area that motherboard makers can truly make a difference.

POST Splash Screen

Here the POST screen shows the Phenom II 975 and 8GB of Kingston DDR3 (4x 2GB) being tested.

2.2TB Infinity is a feature which allows booting from HDDs larger than 2.2TB.  Note that the OS must also support this, such as Win7 x64.

Eup 2013 is an energy-saving initiative set by the EU. 

CPU Phase control lets you switch CPU delivery back to the old-school 4-phase VRM.  And why turn off those cool motherboard LEDs?

U-key is a security feature requiring the user to insert a USB flash drive containing a "key" prior to booting.  This, combined with a bootup password is a simplified version of two-factor authentication.  Cool.

OC Genie Lite attempts to figure out the maximum frequencies and voltages for your CPU and memory during the next reboot.  It takes up to 90 seconds to complete, and it works pretty well.

Why disable cores?  Maybe to save power, benchmarking, or higher OC'ing for fewer cores due to lower heat output.  MSI also allows you to UNLOCK cores in some AMD CPUs.  Imagine buying a 2-core processor then being able to unlock the other 2 cores, resulting in a quad core!  Wow - talk about getting double the processing power for the same price.  That's like 50% off!

Very useful memory info here.

Yes, the Kingston supports DDR3-2133.  It says so right in the BIOS.

MSI provides you with an obscene amount of tweakability here.

I hope future BIOS revisions would give us ratios higher than 1:4 so I can make use of DDR3-2133 while keeping the CPU closer to 1600.

You can OC the PCIe link speed here too.

Voltages are adjusted here by pressing + / -  keys.  The numbers turn red when exceeding safe limits.

BIOS booting and backup from the BIOS.

With so many possible OC adjustments, MSI conveniently provides up to 6 profiles for saving all those settings. 

BRAVO MSI!  Technically, this is an excellent implementation of user needs and functionality.  Marketing-wise, MSI should look at a mouse-driven GUI-based BIOS like that in some Fujitsu laptops, and add a multilingual interface for non-English speaking earthlings.  Then if MSI can open up that GUI just like DD-WRT opened up router functionality to the open-source communities, MSI can sell more hardware because of that.  After all, power users like us would rather buy a router upgradable to 3rd-party firmware than those that cannot be upgraded right?