There may be some sort of new Intel processor release coming soon, something that I, as a new contributor to TR, wouldn't know anything about. I dunno. But as luck would have it, we've obtained a little bit of information about what MSI's next-gen motherboards may feature. I'll show you if you can keep a secret. Shh—don't tell anybody, okay?

The first thing on tap is a backplate, which MSI calls Reactive Armor. Using an insulator between the motherboard with all its electrical components and the (mostly) metal case makes sense, and having some reinforcement on the back should help protect against board flex.

In the same vein, protecting a motherboard from an unexpected shock on the back doesn't do any good if your PC takes a zap over an Ethernet cable. MSI will apparently include enhanced overvoltage protection called LAN Protect. This feature is already shipping on the X99A Godlike Gaming board we covered back in June.

M.2 storage is definitely the way of the future, and MSI seems prepared for that with something it's calling Twin Turbo M.2. On the aforementioned X99A Godlike Gaming, the Turbo M.2 moniker means that board's M.2 slot is paired with four lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity, good for a claimed 32Gb/s. The presence of a pair of these slots could imply that the as-yet-unknown new CPUs or chipsets have plenty of PCI Express lanes on tap. We'll have to wait and see.