this is another product I've received quite a few requests to unbox this is
the MSI Big Bang X power 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 with
this board is that it has USB 3.0 like
many of the newer boards it also has SATA 6 gbit per second so these are two
important features that a lot of the motherboard men manufacturers have felt
this 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 icy chokes which are a newer generation
fite core with up to 20° lower temperature stable power supply and
higher power efficiency they're also using their High conductive polymerized
capacitors up to eight times longer Lifetime and they have a rare highly
stable tantalum core ooh 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 10e
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 leak so um 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 three-way SLI
as well as three-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
SATA 6 gbit per second let's move around to the back where they're talking about
a couple other features so you've got Dr Moss threein One server grade mosfets
here you can look at that uh 400% 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 four phase
traditional mosfet now something that uh 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 motherboard
manufacturers to using a Dr Moss style mosfet they don't call it out as Dr Moss
because uh 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 X power 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 uh vck things so you can
uh 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 connector 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 uh thick fingers and you have trouble with
that fine work we've got a couple SATA 6 GB per second ports as well as a Molex
TOA power adapter we have one very long
SLI bridge and what else do we
have okay these two are SLI so two short
SLI Bridges and then one crossfire
bridge and that's a long one okay then
next we have two SATA 2 uh 3 gbit per second cables as well as a Molex 2 SATA
power adapter and then another pack of that next we have a uh back plane
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 uh color coordinated build you don't want to use
red cables necessarily uh we've got two EA ports as well as a power port and
then they've included a Molex power to
two SATA power adapter so this is uh as well as one eat cable so this is
basically for using be drives hooked up directly to 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 an
IO plate we have a motherboard user
guide this is the Europe version it is English
uh 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 happened to cross that no
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 their hard drive backup utility we've also got this is interesting ooh
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 uh overclocking guide look at
that they include an overclocking guide no way so they talk about OC Genie uh
multi-graphics card gaming design
huh oh here they talk a lot more about the technologies that are involved in uh
in producing a top over clocking 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 uh 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 okay fine cameraman wants to move on okay then we
have the users guide which is um 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 OC
dashboard panel so that plugs into your motherboard and then you have a little
USB uh connector here so take the OC
dashboard through the io Shield connect it to that uh motherboard port okay what
does it do though that's what I want to know okay so this gives you uh BIOS post
codes 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 um an LCD display
on it so you can see that you can adjust a whole bunch of system settings
including things like your uh CPU voltage you can adjust your uh 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 5.0 this is their 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's
still more in here look at this I have never ever seen an accessory package
this complete with anything uh never mind the motherboard so here's the USB
cable for the OC dashboard and here is the uh the other cable for the OC
dashboard so that's the one that plugs in right through the back of the io
Shield which finally we have arrived
at how long I wonder how long this unboxing is already took me like 5
minutes just to get through the uh accessories okay let's have a look at
the motherboard itself finally so this is a premium x58 board that
means you're going to find all of the bells and whistles so the super pipe
here that's an 8 mm heat pipe that goes all the way around from all of the
mosfet coolers and then down to the North Bridge you're going to find an LGA
1366 socket this is a Loz socket so you
don't have to worry about any of that uh 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 two four pins by the look of things but I really would recommend with a board like this either
a single eight pin or if you have two plug in both we've got the easy
installation uh RAM slots so you can see that there are Clips only on the one
side so you basically just slide the module in and clip it from the one side
and you're done uh in theory that saves a little work but I think it's more to
do with the fact that the clips here can sometimes uh 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 but here we go 16 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 per uh all x58 Boards out there on the market
cameraman's wandering around he's looking at the South Bridge but I want to show you the 24 pin power connectors
its ideal location on the right hand edge of the board and then we've got a
nice big Southbridge heat sink here and I think the reason that they put such a
big cooler because the South Bridge 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 SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports
as well as two SATA 36 GB per second ports we've got our V checkpoints for
CPU qpi D DDR ioh I and a ground
connection next we've got a couple of uh
V switches so these are actually uh 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 OC Genie as well as the
direct front side bus or rather I should say base clock adjustment buttons here
you've got front fire wire and then this is a pretty killer feature of this board
you've got six PCI Express 16x slots 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 they will not all run at PCI Express 16x
at the same time so make sure you follow
these guides in order to get the f fastest speed possible because if you
populate one card you're getting 16x two cards 16x if you populate three cards
you're getting 16 168 if you do four cards you're getting 888 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 particulars uh yeah here we go so if you have uh six Lanes install six
expansion cards you're running at 844
844 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 six
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 two PS2 ports very
happy to see that we have a seos clear Port we have their OC tool plugin here
then we have fire wire 6 USB 2.0 ports
one ESAT Port 2 GB Ethernet ports and
two USB 3.0 ports thank you for checking
out my long long unboxing of the MSI Big
Bang X power motherboard