MSI Big Bang XPower2 will be one of the more extreme motherboards for Intel’s new Sandy Bridge-E platform and new pictures reveal a hard attitude. The all-black motherboard is crowned by a shell-case-heatsink and loads of functions.
MSI has taken the Military Class venture one step further by giving the Big Bang XPower with chipset cooler that imitates the competitor Gigabyte G1 with shell cases. MSI says the entire cooler is made from metal, but if the design will actually attract any new buyers remains to be seen.. If that is not enough there is a heatsink on the voltage regulators that looks like a Gatling gun.
There is even better functionality to look for though. The gigantic LGA2011 socket is flanked by eight DDR3 memory slots and the motherboard uses a complete passive cooling system, which is not a given with the Intel X79 platform.
Almost crazy seven PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots are found on the lower half of the board and we see ten SATA connectors and a handful USB 3.0 ports, at least four that is owned by a discrete I/O panel. An X-Fi sound processor from Creative and a bunch of levers for overclocking are spread across the board. This includes buttons Start, reboot and changing the bus frequencies and the automatic overclocking function OC Genie II. MSI has also fitted dedicated measuring spots for checking voltages through a multimeter.
MSI did not reveal the complete specifications of the board, nor the price or availability. It should appear sometime after the launch of Sandy Bridge-E, which is due in a week.
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