We have already taken some looks at high-end X79 motherboard offerings from GIGABYTE, ASUS and ASRock, but now we have the flagship motherboard from MSI – the Big Bang XPower II.
MSI has become known for their consistently good-looking black and blue colour scheme, but they have gone in a new direction with the Big Bang XPower II by implementing an all-black look with the only accent being a bullet clip (magazine?) heat-sink over the X79 chipset.
*Images courtesy of MSI Europe Facebook page and Tech Power Up
At first glance you can see just how beastly this motherboard is. We, of course, have Intel’s upcoming LGA 2011 socket for the soon-to-be-released Sandy Bridge-E enthusiast-level processors as well as eight quad-channel DDR3 DIMM slots, a whopping 28-phase (4 for memory) VRM with Military Class III components and loads of other power features. For instance, we have dual 8-pin connectors for the CPU as and a 6-pin PCIe connector to deliver more power, and therefore stability, to the PCI slots.
Speaking of PCI slots, we have a total of seven (7) physical PCIe 3.0 x16 slots (4 graphics cards at PCIe 3.0 x8 speeds is a good possibility). As for on-board connectivity, we also have 10x SATA (6x SATA 6.0 Gbps and 4x SATA 3.0 Gbps), 2x USB 3.0 internal headers (both at right-angles near the SATA ports), 2x USB 2.0 internal headers, PCIe switches, DirectOC buttons, OC Genie button, diagnostic LEDs, voltage read-out points and surprisingly much more!
Moving to the back I/O we have even more great connectivity options with a combo PS/2 port, 4x USB 3.0, 6x USB 2.0, single FireWire, dual gigabit LAN ports, 8-channel audio (powered by the Creative X-Fi MB2 chip) with optical and coaxial S/PDIF-out and a clear CMOS button.
Overall, the Big Bang XPower II from MSI is a monster of a board. MSI has proven themselves as one of the leaders when it comes to overclocking and power delivery stability. Expect to see this motherboard on shelves within the next month.
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I guess the bullets go well with the whole Military Class MSI has been pushing for a few years now.
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