Not to be outdone by the guys at DFI and Asus, MSI is also hot on the micro-ATX trail with its X58M. The bad news? It's still brown.

Techpowerup broke the news with a nice, large picture showing the latest to MSI's X58 'wares - sporting a full six memory slots, seven SATA, one eSATA, two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, one open-ended x4 and a PCI slot, Realtek High-Definition audio and Gigabit LAN, as well as what looks like old-school overclocking jumpers by the base too.

With six (non-Dr.MOS) phases of power we don't hold out that much hope for overclocking - and we certainly hope MSI does something about the cooling.

There's the usual high quality Nippon Chemicon solid capacitors and sealed chokes dotted around and generally the layout is pretty good considering its condensed size, but MSI - you could have really dropped that estate-expensive IDE and floppy ports!

Considering the Asus Rampage II Gene is a shade over £200 which is "relatively good value" in the grand scheme of X58s, MSI will have to price aggressively in our opinion in order to sway people its way. However, with a market of just a handful of micro-ATX X58s, it's certainly less competitive than the full ATX field where you can't move for a dozen options from every manufacturer.

Do you fancy yourself a micro MSI? Let us know your thoughts, in the forums.