MSI is one of the world's largest and most well-known motherboard manufacturers. In recent years, MSI has become a brand which is focused on PC gaming to the point of rebranding almost all its products and motherboards with "Gaming" branding. Most of these parts have a red and black color scheme and sport a dragon logo on them. MSI, like many other manufacturers has diversified its product portfolio in recent years to include graphics cards, laptops, and other computer related products.

MSI's X299 SLI Plus is a bit different as it isn't part of the gaming brand and lacks the gaming themes typical aesthetic. Given that the X299 Express chipset is intended for motherboards in the HEDT market, MSI's X299 SLI Plus needed to be more mature and not have a sole focus on gaming. It is part of MSI's Pro series and not the gaming series. It's black and white color scheme is far more conservative. It's not as colorful as many of MSI's other offerings. Not that MSI is a particularly bad offender in this area. The HEDT market is fickle and people build systems with 6, 8, or greater core CPUs for a wide variety of purposes. MSI's X299 SLI Plus looks like it would be as at home in a professional workstation as it would a gaming box and I like the elegant simplicity MSI is capable of sometimes. With the right CPU, there is support for 68 PCIe lanes, multi-GPU with either Crossfire or SLI. There are nine power phases with black, solid electrolytic capacitors and an external clock generator which allows a great deal of freedom in overclocking. MSI uses high quality components for its power phases which results in stability and longevity. At least in theory, which is something I will talk about in more detail later.