It has two PCI ports to support additional expansion cards or peripherals.
It has two PCI ports to support additional expansion cards or peripherals.
There were some decent PCI sound cards in the past. Some people may want PCI slots for retro gaming, for example to add a Voodoo2 or something like that as pass through video card. But all this aside, don't rule out the possibility MSI may reuse the pcb layout (and just change the heatsinks and maybe some printed text on the board) for "business" class boards - all the "gaming branding" is pretty much on the heatsinks and io shield ... so they could easily just change those / replace those with more basic heatsinks and they're done. So presence of pci was just a side effect of cost saving, reusing circuit board design. All pci slots share a 133 MB/s bus (32 bit x 33 mhz) so there's either pci support in the chipset (unlikely) or there's a pci-e x1 to pci chip.
The idea of applying the same board layout for various target scenarios came to mind, and it appears to be the most reasonable explanation.