MSI has launched a motherboard with support for eight DIMM's, although you can't use all of them at once. The P45-8D Memory Lover, as its been affectionately named by MSI, is the first motherboard out there to feature four DDR2 and four DDR3 memory slots; and as such it's what is commonly known as a combo board.

Apart from the memory slots, there isn't anything really exciting about the board, although MSI has implemented its DrMOS technology and two new features that are meant to improve the memory performance and overclocking. MSI calls these technologies Memory Identifier and Memory Runner and the first is meant to improve the compatibility and performance by enhancing the signalling between the memory and the chipset, while the latter is meant to make for easier memory over Voltage and overclocking.

In terms of features, you're looking at a single x16 PCIe slot, a single x1 PCIe slot and three PCI slots, part of the reason behind so few slots is that the extra memory slots take up a lot of space and the P45 chipset had to be moved further down on the motherboard. There's also six SATA ports and an IDE connector. We're not quite sure about the rear ports, but it looks like a pair of PS/2 ports, a serial and parallel port, four USB 2.0 ports (there are headers for an additional eight ports on the board), a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, 7.1-channel analog audio and a CMOS reset button.

This could be an interesting product for those that are buying a system now, but are currently using DDR2 memory and would consider upgrading to DDR3 in the future, but don't want to swap their motherboard to do so; but we're not sure if this motherboard brings any real benefits, as combo boards doesn't in general perform as well as motherboards that supports either one or the other kind of memory modules.

You can find the press release here and a few additional pictures here.