Big Bang is a name you have seen quite a lot the last few month, that will not stop as MSI just showed a new mainboard in the Big Bang series, here are all the details !

As we had the chance to discuss with few people at MSI and some others sources we can reveal much more details than what you can find around on the internet

We will point out all the Key features here, the official list of feature will be known next week but here are the information we can tell you…

Gulftown to enjoy a Big Bang

The XPower mainboard is the first LGA 1366 of the Big Bang series, the previous Big Bang series was only focused on INTEL P55 and LGA 1156. With the XPower, the LGA 1366 and hopefully our INTEL Core i7 9xx CPUs as well as the upcoming 980X CPU will be supported on this board.

The black and Blue PCB color scheme used by all the latest MSI mainbord give a good look of the board, and the cooling system that will be used on this board will stay the same color range. The codename of the board is MS-7666 and the PCB revision you can see on the picture is 0A, that mean it’s the really first revision and people expecting launch for March may wait longer. From our sources the board won’t be available before late April.

The chipset used is an INTEL X58 with ICH10R southbridge and will feature 6 * USB2 port in addition to 2 * USB3 using a NEC chip. Six SATA2 connector and two SATA3 connector using a Marvel controller will take care of the storage I/O part. The board have five fan connectors, and the CPU fan connector got a 4pins PWM one.

Power is the key of Overclocking next Intel CPU

As Massman and M.Beier pointed out during our tech talk video below, Gulftown are really sensible to CPU Power and PSU capacity. MSI use some special Mosfets components called DrMOS on their Intel mainboard.

With the Big Bang XPower you’ll have 16 Phases for the CPU only teamed with tantalum capacitors called Hi-c Cap for marketing purpose. Regarding the performances of 8 DrMOS phases on earlier MSI motherboard, we can expect some impressive result from that side. All those phases are powered using two 8 pin PSU connector.

You will be able to control how many phases are used in the bios and software with the Active Phase Switching (APS) feature, on the top side of memory slot you have 16 LED showing you exactly how many phases are used. The APS feature can control phase usage automatically.

Quad-Crossfire and PhysX ?

The MSI Big Bang XPower is using a X58 Tylersburg chipset and provide six graphic card slots. As the X58 chipset allow a maximum of 32 PCI-Express line, that means you can have the following multi-card configuration :

• x16 / x16
• x16 / x8 / x8
• x8 / x8 / x8 / x8
• x8 / x4 / x4 / x8 / x4 / x4

This configuration can allow you to run Quad CrossfireX setup with two more graphic card dedicated to Physics calculation.

Note that the X58 chipset got two dedicated DrMOS phases (with two LED showing actual phases used) and you have an optional PCi-E 6pin Power connector to feed the Graphic card slot with extra power.

Oveclocking features – Everything you ever wanted ?

Maybe MSI’s engineers wanted to put all the good work related to overclocking features in this motherboards. You have so many way to enjoy overclocking whatever is you level and knowledge.

MSI Proprietary OC Genie

OC Genie is the one second overclocking tool from MSI, press the button, boot up and the board is overclocked directly without needing to enter the bios. This feature is really useful to give a performance boost even for people that don’t have knowledge about overclocking.

Direct OC – Touch Button

Beside OC Genie, you can increase BaseClock frequency with Direct OC Touch button, this are tactile buttons directly on the mainboard PCB and you’ll be able to choose the step of overclocking when using the Direct OC Touch Button.

OC Dashboard

The board will came with the new OC Dashboard, already featured in the Big bang Fuzion, allowing to remote overclock your system.

V-switch & V-Check = V-kit

Big Bang XPower will feature V-switch and V-Check that was implemented on previous high end board. V-switch is used to Boost instantly from 0.1V step the CPU vCore, CPU VTT voltage, vQPI and vDDR. The V-check allow you to monitor the real voltage applied with a multimeter.

Memory Switch & Safe Memory Button

This two features doesn’t have official name yet but 2 switches allow you to choose default memory speed with the need to set the settings in the bios. As well as the button will allow you to boot the system with some fail-safe memory settings. This is a features we have already seen on another brand board.

Note that the memory got 2 dedicated DrMOS phases and you can see with LED how many are used.

Easy Button 2 – On-board tactile PCB button

Usual power and reset tactile button (called easy button 2) are there on the bottom of the mainboard, aswell as the Clear CMOS button on the I/O backpanel. A POST Code display is on-board to show diagnostic error and bootup procedure.

General features

The cooling solution will be based on SuperPipe design and will probably be similar to the one on the Big Bang Fuzion board.

Ultima Gaming audio experience will be achieved by a Quantum Wave Audio Card, THX TruStudio PC Suite and Creative EAX 5.0 Support. There are two dual Gbt Lan, Firewire (IEEE 1394), two e-sata and a regular hybrid PS2 port.

As you may understand, this board as been unveiled for CeBIT show and is not yet final, the specifications in this articles are the actual ones, MSI will add more features, especially in the bundle that is not defined yet.

Expected launch date for this board is not before second half of April. The retail price is not yet known but MSRP should be around 380$ (US).