Gadgetory

welcome to my proper unboxing of the MSI Big Bang mPower this is a z77 motherboard that changes the game of overclocking and I'm actually sort of on board with what they're doing here so has a three-year warranty it's got all the usual z77 features including support for the latest Intel Core i3 i5 and i7 processors on LGA 1155 Windows 700 and Windows eight compatible there's that new logo right there AMD crossfire nvidia sli or supported virtue MVP is also supported which means you've got things like their virtual vsync as well as performance boost I haven't had that much experience with it being compatible with a wide variety of different titles but hey if you find a doubt that it works for the games that you play then great and hence components you got their driver MOSFETs you've got their OC PCB that's an interesting thing to call it solid caps Superferry chokes hi-c caps great so this is all their usual military class 3 stuff hybrid digital power interesting enhanced PWM design with hybrid digital power designed for overclocking on case Q CPU so yes overclockable CPUs 8 pin power for the CPU width at 6 p.m. on jewellery power for video cards these are useful and I prefer a 6 pin to a molex just because these days I hardly have any molexes in my system and it's hard to like write one up there and hence thermals ok Twin Frozr for base design interesting total fan control with all 4 pin PWM fan connectors on board you can customise them in the BIOS or in Windows monitor and record all the fan speeds UV checkpoints so you can actually use a multimeter to check your voltages because software based ones are not useful Multi BIOS - this has saved my bacon at least once before easy buttons onboard power and reset clear CMOS button on the back end a debug led Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are included as well as SATA 3 6 kV per second you know what all this information is stuff that we could see by just opening up the board so I'm sort of done with people design of the blocks for now here's an overclocking guide very cool to know something like that and included neat stuff ok next we've got the i/o shield for say 2 3 6 gigabit per second cables or what doesn't really make a difference antenna for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi presumably okay all right you got a flexible black SLI bridge my very favorite kind and connectors to make those front panel connectors a little bit easier to do driver's disk quick installation guide certificate of quality and stability now actually I'm gonna set this aside and we are going to talk about it more later software an application to use this guide motherboard users guide and V checkpoint cables so that you can actually plug something into them alright motherboard itself I haven't even gotten into what's good about this board yet you guys this is a very very exciting board for one particularly important reason and that is the gorgeous matte black piece you know that's not actually it so the matte black PCB is good but let's go let's talk about what makes this board special so this certificate of quality and stability we've seen this with products before however MSI has really stepped up their game with the empower being OC certified that's the terminology they're using here OC certified performance power and PWM cooling however they really take it to the next level check this out military class burnin test every single board that means this board the board you buy the board your friend buys has gone through strict tests to guarantee a stable overclocking results so they actually take every board they install a CPU liquid cooler which means the PWM is not getting any particular incidental airflow from their test bench they overclock a case series CPU to 4.6 gigahertz or more depending on the CPU not every test platform is exactly the same so a real overclock like not you know an OC Genie overclock like a real overclock then they put it in an unrealistically high temperature environment and they run prime95 to beat the snot out of the CPU at that overclocked setting for 24 hours plus crazy right every single board is overclocking validated with an overclocked CPU the odds of getting a dud and power board is basically nil because every single board is hand tested that doesn't happen on regular motherboards very very cool stuff really stepping up their game right now these end the side guys all right so let's cover the layout there's your LGA 1155 socket lots of room around it for big coolers 8 pin CPU connectors and it's ideal location at the top left you got your four ddr3 slots supporting dual channel memory you've also got your onboard power connectors this is my new favorite spot for them there's your OC Genie or reset in your power because once you've got a bunch of cards installed it's kind of hard to reach the ones that are down here or around here 24 pin power connector and it's ideal location there's the auxilary 6 pin for your graphics cards as well as your v checkpoints for checking the voltages there's your post debug LED and again this is my new favorite location for this the on-board USB 3 header is at a right angle on the right-hand edge of the board perfect say 2 3 6 gigabit per second 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports there's your multi bio switch to switch between the two physical BIOS chips got a couple of front USB 2 ports a couple headers normal ones and you've also got a high powered one for charging things like an iPad ok you've got a ha due to bandwidth allocation limitations strongly recommended ok so you want to use an Ivy Bridge processor if you're going to use this bottom slot otherwise these ones will run at PCIe 2 8 X 8 X with a sandy bridge or PCIe 3 8 X 8 X with an Ivy Bridge chip you've got this is a fully PCIe board so you've got four PCI you want X slots and then three PCIe 16x slots however physically they're 16 or 8 8 4 and this 4 runs off the chipset so it's not as good of a force so basically this is a dual card board moving right along to this is actually I think this is the best matte black PCB I've yet seen so let's give me the thumbs up because it's so clean like you can hardly even see the traces it just looks like if I change the angle a little bit you can see the traces sometimes probably but then other times you can it's like very stealthy looking let's have a look at the twin froze or for inspired cooler so it's got a very neat shape to it that actually gives it a lot of surface area even really you can't see a lot of it and it's using a nice thick heat pipe I think MSI is branding for this used to be super pipe but I haven't seen them really used that lately checking out these LEDs so you can see how many of your 12 flowerpower phases are active on the CPU at any given time so when you're doing something intensive those are going to crank up to the top and when you're not they're going to stay right down near the bottom it just kind of needs stuff because when you're not consuming a lot of power fewer power phases being active is actually more efficient so there you go you learned something today unless you already knew that in which case you didn't learn something today all right let's have a look at the back i/o you got your ps2 port I still like to see that two USB 2.0 ports six USB 3.0 port two Bluetooth your Wi-Fi Gigabit Ethernet is built-in display port an HDMI handle your or your video out remember guys you can use the onboard video here for your video transcoding functionality and you can use your dedicated graphics card for gaming you've got optical audio out as well as 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the z77 mPower from msi and i think this looks like my phone and don't forget to subscribe to honest tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos and don't forget the most important thing about this board hand texting you want a board that works 100% okay I can't say 100% but 99.99% it will work if you buy one because it's hand tested