Gadgetory

this is another product I've received quite a few requests unbox this is the MSI big bang xpower and this is part of the refresh of x58 boards that we've seen over the last couple months so most of the major manufacturers are taking their old x58 designs and they're updating them so one of the first features that we can talk about what this board is that it has USB 3.1 or boards it also has say 26 gigabit per second so these are two important features that a lot of the motherboard manufacturers have felt is necessary to redesign their boards for so let's talk about some of the msi exclusive features first of all this is military class that means they're using only top quality components including IC chokes which are a newer generation ferrite core with up to 20 degree lower temperature stable power supply and higher power efficiency they're also using their high conductive polymerised capacitors up to eight times longer lifetime and they have a rare highly stable tantalum core mmm self-repair ability okay this I was not aware of but apparently they can repair themselves it also has solid capacitors so up to a 10 year lifetime under full load and then this is kind of interesting so they say for gaming up to 12 years and for office up to 40 years but basically they're saying 10 years assuming you're running this 24 7 and they will not explode I think what they mean is leaked so no explosion is guaranteed on this particular motherboard so let's move a little bit further down we have eax advanced HD support as well as THX certification on this particular audio solution so it's their quantum wave gaming audio card it's still onboard audio but it is on a riser card so you will get a little bit less electrical interference if you are using the analog outputs it supports up to 3-way SLI as well as 3-way crossfire so you can see they've got it demoed here with a three-way crossfire configuration and as I already said before USB 3.0 and say 26 gigabit per second let's move around to the back where they're talking about a couple other features so you've got dr. Moss three and one server grade MOSFETs here you can look at that four hundred percent faster than a traditional MOSFET so that means in terms of the switching speed and they're saying that one phase of dr. Moss is more efficient than a 4k phase traditional MOSFET now something that I've actually noticed is there are some other motherboards not made by msi that have actually switched over on the very high end from other method board manufacturers to using a dr. Moss style MOSFET they don't call it out as dr. Moss because that's MSI's marketing name for it but they have started to make that switch so here is a quick guide for the big bang xpower shows us all the features of the board but we have a real board to look at so we're not going to bother with that and let's have a look at the accessory package which is absolutely huge I don't even know where to start with this okay well first thing we've got our V check V check things so you can plug these into your motherboard and then you can check voltages using a multimeter that's a great feature to have on an enthusiast grade board next we have their front panel connectors so you can plug all the stuff you need into these and then plug them directly into the board in one chunk if you have thick fingers and you have trouble with that fine work we've got a couple say 26 gigabit per second ports as well as a molex to SATA power adapter we have one very long SLI bridge and what else do you have okay these two are SLI so two shorter SLI bridges and then one crossfire bridge and that's a long one okay then next we have to say two to three gigabit per second cables as well as a molex to SATA power adapter and then another pack of that next we have a backplane adapter and this I like to see they've got black SATA cables connected to it i've seen these in the past included with motherboards but they're always red and if you have like a nice color coordinated build you don't want to use red cables necessarily we've got to e SATA ports as well as a power port and then they've included a molex power to to say to power adapter so this is as well as one east SATA cable so this is basically for using bear drives hooked up directly for the back of your pc just as like a cheap way to add more storage next we've got two USB 2.0 ports on I owe plate we have a motherboard user guide this is the Europe version it is English German Russian and French okay shows you how to install your CPU tells you all about oh this is this is interesting we're going to need this for later i'm really glad i happen to cross that note we're going to talk about it later so we've got a drivers and utilities DVD throw it away we have a quantum wave driver throw it away download the latest ones they're hard drive backup utility we've also got it was interesting whoo this is for the OC dashboard okay we'll have a closer look at that in a minute as well so much stuff in here quick installation guide msi winky user guide msi overclocking guide look at that they include an overclocking guide no way so they talk about OC genie a multi graphics card gaming design huh well here they talk a lot more about the technologies that are involved in in producing a top overclocking board that's really cool I've never seen something like this before usually this is the kind of marketing materials you see before you buy it but they actually want to help you really understand this particular board look at this they've got indicator lights for how many CPU phases are active because under low load it's actually more efficient to have fewer cpu power phases but under high load you need more in order to deliver stable power so they actually dynamically adjust how many phases are running and then they give you a little indicator to tell you how many that is very cool super pipe that's another thing i forgot to talk about okay fine cameraman wants to move them okay then we have the user's guide which is in more in-depth shows you a bunch of the bios features finally we have the OC dashboard okay so let's have a look at the all the stuff about this so the OC dashboard panel so that plugs into your motherboard and then you have a little USB connector here so take the OC dashboard through the i/o shield connect it to that motherboard court okay what does it do though that's what I want to know okay so this gives you bios postcodes so if there's some kind of a problem this will give you a code on here to tell you what exactly is the problem it does have an LCD display on it so you can see that you can adjust a whole bunch of system settings including things like your CPU voltage you can adjust your other voltages DDR voltage you can adjust you can use direct OC mode in order to just directly turn up the cpu frequency so that's something that I can imagine a lot of people using and last but not least it also displays some interesting system information such as CPU temperatures and other things like that and there's more there's still more so including creative alchemy as well as the ax five-point oh this is there included onboard sound card so it has optical as well as coaxial audio out and 7.1 analog audio out and there's still more there still more in here look at this I have never ever seen an accessory package this complete with anything never mind the motherboard so here's the USB cable for the OC dashboard and here is the the other cable for the OC dashboard so that's the one that plugs it in right through the back of the i/o shield which finally we have arrived at how long I wonder how long this unboxing is already took me like five minutes just to get through the accessories okay let's have a look at the motherboard itself finally so this is a premium x58 board that means are going to find all of the bells and whistles so the superpipe here that's an eight millimeter heat pipe that goes all the way around from all of the MOSFET coolers and then down to the Northbridge you're going to find an LGA 1366 socket this is a loads socket so you don't have to worry about any of that scare stuff that was going around with poor contact between the CPU and the pins inside we've got not one but two 8-pin power connectors up in their ideal location on the top left of the board okay you can plug in to four pins by the look of things but I really would recommend with the board like this either a single 8 pin or if you have to plug in both we've got the easy installation Ram slots so you can see that there are clips only on the one side so you basically just slide the module in clip it from the one side and you're done in theory that saves a little work but I think it's more to do with the fact that the clips here can sometimes bump up against the back of a graphics card installed in the top pcie slot so that really conveniences you that way okay I don't think conveniences you is actually a valid thing to say that here we go sixteen phases of CPU power with indicator LEDs up here showing you how many are actually active at any given time these memory slots do support triple channel memory so you're going to want to populate the black ones first and then the blue ones as for all x 58 boards out there on the market tremor man's wandering around he's looking at the Southbridge but I want to show you the 24 pin power connector is in its ideal location on the right-hand edge of the board and then we've got a nice big southbridge heatsink here and I think the reason that they put such a big cooler because the Southbridge doesn't need a lot of cooling is because you can install so many graphics cards in this motherboard so if you've got this all filled up you're going to need a fair bit of cooling down here in order to keep that at a safe operating temperature because graphics cards do kick out a lot of heat down here we've got six say two to three gigabit per second ports as well as to say 236 gigabit per second ports we've got our V checkpoints for a CPU qpi DC DD r io h IC h and a ground connection next we've got a couple of these switches so these are actually hardware voltage switches i believe and then we've got a couple of front USB headers this is a feature I love these are touch sensitive buttons so you've got power reset o see Jeanie as well as the direct front side bus or rather I should say base clock adjustment buttons here you've got front firewire and then this is a pretty killer feature of this board you've got six pci express 16x slot but there is a bit of a catch so here in the manual i found the page that tells you how to install your graphics cards now we will not all run at pci express 16x at the same time so make sure you follow these guides in order to get the fastest speed possible because if you populate one card you're getting 16 x 2 cards 16 x if you populate three cards you're getting 16 16 8 if you do four cards you're getting eight eight eight if you do five cards I believe one of them scales down to 4x and if you're doing six cards I believe two of them scale down to 4x although I could be mistaken about the exact particular yeah here we go so if you have six lanes install six expansion cards you're running at 84 4844 okay so there I was actually mistaken quite a few of them will scale down to 4x now it should be noted that 8x is not going to impact performance in anything but a synthetic benchmark so you can do up to four cards at 8x and then 4x actually for most cards on the market will not have a negative performance impact if you are installing six graphics cards make sure you do plug into the supplemental PCI Express 6 pin power connector here that's to make sure that your graphics cards do get enough power because none of these other ports are going to be able to provide enough power through the motherboard for that many video cards last but not least we're moving around to the back of the board where we've got 2 ps2 ports very happy to see that we have AC most clear port we have their OC tool plug in here then we have firewire six USB 2.0 ports 1 e SATA port two gigabit ethernet ports and two USB 3.0 ports thank you for checking out my long long unboxing of the msi big bang xpower motherboard