MSI Big Bang Xpower 3-Way SLI & CrossfireX X58 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,477 words · ~12 min read
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this is another product I've received quite a few requests to unbox this is
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the MSI Big Bang X power and this is
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part of the refresh of x58 boards that we've seen over the last couple months
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so most of the major manufacturers are taking their old x58 designs and they're
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updating them so one of the first features that we can talk about with
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this board is that it has USB 3.0 like
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many of the newer boards it also has SATA 6 gbit per second so these are two
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important features that a lot of the motherboard men manufacturers have felt
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this necessary to redesign their boards for so let's talk about some of the MSI
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exclusive features first of all this is military class that means they're using
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only top quality components including icy chokes which are a newer generation
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fite core with up to 20° lower temperature stable power supply and
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higher power efficiency they're also using their High conductive polymerized
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capacitors up to eight times longer Lifetime and they have a rare highly
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stable tantalum core ooh self-repair
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ability okay this I was not aware of but apparently they can repair themselves it
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also has solid capacitors so up to a 10e
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lifetime Under full load and then this
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is kind of interesting so they say for gaming up to 12 years and for office up
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to 40 years but basically they're saying 10 years assuming you're running this
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24/7 and they will not explode I think
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what they mean is leak so um no explosion is guaranteed on this
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particular motherboard so let's move a little bit further down we have eax
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Advanced HD support as well as THX certification on this particular audio
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solution so it's their Quantum wave gaming audio card it's still onboard
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audio but it is on a riser card so you will get a little bit less electrical
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interference if you are using the analog outputs it supports up to three-way SLI
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as well as three-way Crossfire so you can see they've got it demoed here with
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a three-way Crossfire configuration and as I already said before USB 3.0 and
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SATA 6 gbit per second let's move around to the back where they're talking about
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a couple other features so you've got Dr Moss threein One server grade mosfets
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here you can look at that uh 400% faster
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than a traditional mosfet so that means in terms of the switching speed and
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they're saying that one phase of Dr Moss is more efficient than a four phase
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traditional mosfet now something that uh I've actually noticed is there are some
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other motherboards not made by MSI that
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have actually switched over on the very high end from other motherboard
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manufacturers to using a Dr Moss style mosfet they don't call it out as Dr Moss
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because uh that's MSI's marketing name for it but they have started to make
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that switch so here is a quick guide for
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The Big Bang X power shows us all the features of the board but we have a real
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board to look at so we're not going to bother with that and let's have a look
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at the accessory package which is absolutely huge I don't even know where
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to start with this okay well first thing we've got our V uh vck things so you can
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uh plug these into your motherboard and then you can check voltages using a multimeter that's a great feature to
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have on an Enthusiast grade board next we have their front panel connector so
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you can plug all the stuff you need into these and then plug them directly into
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the board in one chunk if you have uh thick fingers and you have trouble with
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that fine work we've got a couple SATA 6 GB per second ports as well as a Molex
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TOA power adapter we have one very long
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SLI bridge and what else do we
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have okay these two are SLI so two short
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SLI Bridges and then one crossfire
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bridge and that's a long one okay then
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next we have two SATA 2 uh 3 gbit per second cables as well as a Molex 2 SATA
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power adapter and then another pack of that next we have a uh back plane
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adapter and this I like to see they've got black SATA cables connected to it
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I've seen these in the past included with motherboards but they're always red
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and if you have like a nice uh color coordinated build you don't want to use
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red cables necessarily uh we've got two EA ports as well as a power port and
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then they've included a Molex power to
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two SATA power adapter so this is uh as well as one eat cable so this is
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basically for using be drives hooked up directly to the back of your PC just as
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like a cheap way to add more storage next we've got two USB 2.0 ports on an
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IO plate we have a motherboard user
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guide this is the Europe version it is English
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uh German Russian and French okay shows
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you how to install your CPU tells you all about oh this is this is interesting
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we're going to need this for later I'm really glad I happened to cross that no
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we're going to talk about it later so we've got a drivers and utilities DVD
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throw it away we have a Quantum wave driver throw it away download the latest
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ones their hard drive backup utility we've also got this is interesting ooh
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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
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installation guide MSI winky user
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guide MSI uh overclocking guide look at
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that they include an overclocking guide no way so they talk about OC Genie uh
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multi-graphics card gaming design
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huh oh here they talk a lot more about the technologies that are involved in uh
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in producing a top over clocking board that's really cool I've never seen something like this
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before usually this is the kind of marketing materials you see before you buy it but they actually want to help
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you uh really understand this particular board look at this they've got indicator
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lights for how many CPU phases are active because under low load it's
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actually more efficient to have fewer CPU power phases but under high load you
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need more in order to deliver stable power so they actually dynamically
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adjust how many phases are running and then they give you a little indicator to
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tell you how many that is very cool super pipe that's
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another thing I forgot to talk okay fine cameraman wants to move on okay then we
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have the users guide which is um in more
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in depth shows you a bunch of the BIOS features finally we have the OC
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dashboard okay so let's have a look at the all the stuff about this so OC
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dashboard panel so that plugs into your motherboard and then you have a little
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USB uh connector here so take the OC
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dashboard through the io Shield connect it to that uh motherboard port okay what
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does it do though that's what I want to know okay so this gives you uh BIOS post
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codes so if there's some kind of a problem this will give you a code on
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here to tell you what exactly is the problem it does have um an LCD display
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on it so you can see that you can adjust a whole bunch of system settings
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including things like your uh CPU voltage you can adjust your uh other
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voltages DDR voltage you can adjust you can use direct OC mode in order to just
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directly turn up the CPU frequency so that's something that I can imagine a
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lot of people using and last but not least it also displays some interesting
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system information such as CPU temperatures and other things like that
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and there's more there's still more so including creative Alchemy as well as
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the ax 5.0 this is their included onboard sound card so it has Optical as
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well as coaxial audio out and 7.1 analog
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audio out and there's still more there's
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still more in here look at this I have never ever seen an accessory package
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this complete with anything uh never mind the motherboard so here's the USB
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cable for the OC dashboard and here is the uh the other cable for the OC
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dashboard so that's the one that plugs in right through the back of the io
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Shield which finally we have arrived
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at how long I wonder how long this unboxing is already took me like 5
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minutes just to get through the uh accessories okay let's have a look at
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the motherboard itself finally so this is a premium x58 board that
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means you're going to find all of the bells and whistles so the super pipe
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here that's an 8 mm heat pipe that goes all the way around from all of the
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mosfet coolers and then down to the North Bridge you're going to find an LGA
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1366 socket this is a Loz socket so you
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don't have to worry about any of that uh scare stuff that was going around with
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poor contact between the CPU and the pins inside we've got not one but two 8
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Pin power connectors up in their ideal location on the top left of the board
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okay you can plug in two four pins by the look of things but I really would recommend with a board like this either
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a single eight pin or if you have two plug in both we've got the easy
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installation uh RAM slots so you can see that there are Clips only on the one
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side so you basically just slide the module in and clip it from the one side
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and you're done uh in theory that saves a little work but I think it's more to
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do with the fact that the clips here can sometimes uh bump up against the back of
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a graphics card installed in the top PCIe slot so that really conveniences
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you that way okay I don't think conveniences you is actually a valid
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thing to say but here we go 16 phases of CPU power with indicator LEDs up here
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showing you how many are actually active at any given time these memory slots do
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support triple Channel memory so you're going to want to populate the black ones
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first and then the blue ones as per uh all x58 Boards out there on the market
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cameraman's wandering around he's looking at the South Bridge but I want to show you the 24 pin power connectors
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its ideal location on the right hand edge of the board and then we've got a
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nice big Southbridge heat sink here and I think the reason that they put such a
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big cooler because the South Bridge doesn't need a lot of cooling is because
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you can install so many graphics cards in this motherboard so if you've got
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this all filled up you're going to need a fair bit of cooling down here in order
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to keep that at a safe operating temperature because graphics cards do
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kick out a lot of heat down here we've
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got six SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports
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as well as two SATA 36 GB per second ports we've got our V checkpoints for
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CPU qpi D DDR ioh I and a ground
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connection next we've got a couple of uh
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V switches so these are actually uh Hardware voltage switches I believe and
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then we've got a couple of front USB headers this is a feature I love these
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are touch sensitive buttons so you've got power reset OC Genie as well as the
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direct front side bus or rather I should say base clock adjustment buttons here
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you've got front fire wire and then this is a pretty killer feature of this board
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you've got six PCI Express 16x slots but
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there is a bit of a catch so here in the manual I found the page that tells you
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how to install your graphics cards now they will not all run at PCI Express 16x
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at the same time so make sure you follow
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these guides in order to get the f fastest speed possible because if you
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populate one card you're getting 16x two cards 16x if you populate three cards
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you're getting 16 168 if you do four cards you're getting 888 if you do five
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cards I believe one of them scales down to 4X and if you're doing six cards I
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believe two of them scale down to 4X although I could be mistaken about the
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exact particulars uh yeah here we go so if you have uh six Lanes install six
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expansion cards you're running at 844
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844 okay so there I was actually mistaken quite a few of them will scale
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down to 4X now it should be noted that 8X is not going to impact performance in
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anything but a synthetic Benchmark so you can do up to four cards at 8X and
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then 4X actually for most cards on the market will not have a negative
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performance impact if you are installing six
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graphics cards make sure you do plug into the supplemental PCI Express six
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pin power connector here that's to make sure that your graphics cards do get
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enough power because none of these other ports are going to be able to provide
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enough power through the motherboard for that many video cards last but not least
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we're moving around to the back of the board where we've got two PS2 ports very
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happy to see that we have a seos clear Port we have their OC tool plugin here
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then we have fire wire 6 USB 2.0 ports
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one ESAT Port 2 GB Ethernet ports and
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two USB 3.0 ports thank you for checking
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out my long long unboxing of the MSI Big
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Bang X power motherboard