Preview: MSI Big Bang Xpower II X79
Published by Marc Büchel on 09.02.12Fazit
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| Holding the MSI Big Bang XPower II in your hands for the first time, gave us quite a strange feeling. Despite the fact that we have to motherboards every day, the XL-ATX formfactor is strangely huge. Already eATX is big, but this is massive. A Rampage IV Extreme almost looks small next to the Big Bang Xpower II. Therefore you can expect that there is plenty of space to install a lot of hardware and there are no components colliding with eachother. Generally we also liked the design, except the weaponry coolers. We would really like to do MSI make two versions of this board. One with the weapon coolers and another with nicely shaped standard coolers. We also liked the fact that this board offers a total of seven full size PCI Express slots. Therefore you can have Quad SLI as well as Quad CrossFireX setups running on this motherboard. And sure there are four slots that already offer support for PCI Express 3.0. | - Design - 7 x Full-Size-PCI-Express - Quad SLI Support |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Generally the MSI Big Bang Xpower II's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There even is a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. The reason that there are seven full size PCI Express slots makes it inevitable that in a quad SLI setup you'll have to place one card in the last slot available. This means, that if you have a dual slot card, the connectors as well as the power and reset buttons will be covered by the graphics card. The XL-ATX formfactor this board ships with, offers as many advantages as it offers disadvantages. The space for hardware to install this board offers comes at the cost of compatibilty concerning cases. |
- Angled SATA connectors - Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Spac around the CPU socket - Placement of the power design |
- XL-ATX | |
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 4 - Connectors and I/O |
| Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery | Page 5 - Conclusion |
| Page 3 - Layout |
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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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