Welcome to my proper unboxing of the MSI Big Bang M Power. 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 LG 1155,
Windows 7, and Windows 8 compatible. There's that new logo right there. AMD
Crossfire, NVIDIA SLI are 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 it out that it works
for the games that you play, then great enhanced components. So, you got their
driver MOSFETs, you've got their OCPCB,
that's an interesting thing to call it. Solid caps, uh, super far chokes, high-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 K SKU CPU. So yes, overclockable CPUs. 8 pin power for the
CPU with a six pin auxiliary power for video cards. These are useful and I
prefer a six pin to a Molex just because these days I hardly have any Molexes in
my system and it's hard to like route one up there. Enhanced thermals. Okay.
Twin frozer fourbased design. Interesting. total fan control with all
four pin PWM fan connectors on board. You can customize them in the BIOS or in
Windows and monitor and record all the fan speeds. You got your V check points
so you can actually use a multimeter to check your voltages because softwarebased ones are not useful.
Multibios 2. This has saved my bacon at least once before. Easy buttons, onboard
power and reset. Clear SIMOS button on the back and a debug LED. Bluetooth and
Wi-Fi are included as well as SATA 36 GB
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 the outside of the box
for now. Here's an overclocking guide. Very cool to have something like that
included. Neat stuff. Okay. Next, we've got the IO shield, four SATA 36 Gbit per
second cables, although it doesn't really make a difference. Antenna for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
presumably. Cool. All right, we 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 disc, uh,
quick installation guide, certificate of
quality and stability. Now, actually, I'm going to set this aside and we are
going to talk about it more later. Software and applications users guide,
motherboard users guide, and V checkpoint cables so that you can
actually, you know, plug something into them. All right, motherboard itself.
Okay, 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 PC. No,
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 M Power 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 burn-in test. Every single board,
that means this board, the board you buy, the board your friend buys, has
gone through strict tests to guarantee 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 air flow from their test bench. They
overclock a K series CPU to 4.6 GHz or
more depending on the CPU. Not every test platform is exactly the same. So a
real overclock, like not, you know, an OCG overclock, like a real overclock.
Then they put it in an unrealistically high temperature environment and they
run Prime 95 to beat the snot out of the CPU at that overclock setting for 24
hours plus. Crazy, right? Every single board
is overclocking validated with an overclocked CPU. The odds of getting a
dud empower 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 MSI guys. All right, so let's cover the layout. There's your LG 1155
socket. Lots of room around it for big coolers. Eight pin CPU connectors in its
ideal location at the top left. You got your four uh 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 OCG, your reset, and your power. Uh
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 in its ideal location. There's the auxiliary
six 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 onboard USB3 headers at a right angle on the right
hand edge of the board. Perfect. SATA 3 6 GB per second. Four SATA 2 3 GB per
second ports. There's your multibio switch to switch between the two
physical BIOS chips. You've got a couple front USB 2 ports, a couple uh headers,
normal ones, and you've also got a high-owered one for charging things like
an iPad. Okay, you've got aha due to bandwidth allocation limitations.
Strongly recommended. Okay, 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
28x8x with a Sandy Bridge or PCIe 38X8X
with an Ivy Bridge chip. You've got this is a fully PCIe board. So you got four
PCIe 1X slots and then three PCIe 16X
slots. However, physically they're 16 or 88 4 and this four runs off the chipset.
So it's not as good of a four. So basically this is a dual cardboard.
Moving right along to this is actually I think this is the best matte black PCB
I've yet seen. Slick's giving 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't. It's like very stealthy
looking. Let's have a look at the Twin Furer 4 inspired cooler. So, it's got a
very neat shape to it that actually gives it a lot of surface area even though you can't see a lot of it. And
it's using a nice thick heat pipe. I think MSI's branding for this used to be
super pipe, but I haven't seen them really use that lately. Check it out.
Phase LEDs. So, you can see how many of your 12 power phases are uh 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, which is kind of neat 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 IO. You got your PS2 port. I still like to see
that. Two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0
ports, your Bluetooth, your Wi-Fi, gigabit Ethernet is builtin, display
port and HDMI to handle your a 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 M
Power from MSI. And I think Slick's letting the camera fall a little bit
there. And uh don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
reviews, and other computer videos. And don't forget the most important thing about this board, hand tested. 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.