Early look at MSI's Xpower X58 Big Bang motherboard

The lucky folks at bit-tech were given a final retail sample of MSI's next stab at a board using the X58 chipset for them to check out in detail.

Dubbed the Xpower X58 which is part of MSI's new Big Bang line-up of enthusiast oriented motherboards, this one brings all the latest tricks to the table, including USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support, as well as support for Gulftown (six-core Core i7s).



Looking at a full shot of the board, what will quickly catch your eye is the six PCI-E x16 slots. However, there's no NF200 chip on the board so it would seem that at best, four of the slots each give eight lanes of bandwidth for multi-GPU setups.



Also standing out physically on the board is the use of MSI's "SuperPipe" branded cooling system, curving around the CPU socket to heatsinks covering the MOSFETs and X58 Northbridge. Another separate large heatsink is seated over the ICH10R Southbridge.



The CPU VRM uses a 16-phase PWM circuit that draws power from two 8-pin power connectors, using MSI's DrMOS chips and High-C capacitors. MSI of course includes a whole bunch of exclusive features and technologies such as OC Genie, OC Dashboard module, V-kit (for manual voltage monitoring) and more.

No word on exact pricing or availability as yet, only that we know it's going to be released very soon.