Layout

A first glance reveals that MSI chose to paint their Big Bang Xpower II entirely in black. Therefore PCB as well as expansions slots are black. Very flashy, or even flamboyant, that's what the southbridge cooler is. It is shaped like a magazine with six bullets. In our opinion this was kind of brave move because you'll either love or hat this cooler. Thanks to it's huge XL-ATX formfactor there is plenty of space everywhere.

MSI equipped the Big Bang Xpower II with a 22 phase current supply regarding CPU and Memory. Furthermore MSI implemented a digital power design which should emit less electromagnetic radiation than its analogue counterpart. MSI claims that the system stability could be enhanced even further, especially during extreme overclocking.

Totally you'll find eight DIMM-slots on the Big Bang Xpower II. The official clock speeds that are - if the CPUs integrated memory controller is capable: DDR3 2400 (O.C.) / 2133 (O.C.) / 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders.

Southbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The cooling blocks haven been positioned wisely, which means that they don't collide with memory or CPU cooler. We think that a magazine as a southbridge cooler and a gatling shaped cooler for the power design is a very brave move, because - as we've already said - one either likes or hates this.