Introduction

MSI has had an interesting couple of years. During CES 2010 we saw them show off their new line of Big Bang motherboards with Lucid Logix's Hydra chips on them. Unfortunately we saw this demo stutter through 3DMark Vantage. They were able to recover from that and managed to put out a few good boards with this package in them. We took a look at a couple of them here on TweakTown (and will probably look at more to come).

Then this year at CES, we heard from one source at MSI that they were planning on using the Hydra as more of a bridge chip for adding extra PCIe 2.0 lanes on their high end boards to enable tri and quad SLI as well as Crossfire. So, the question is, where does Hydra fit into the Big Band series now?

We have the P67 based Big Bang Marshal up on the test bench and are going to take it through its paces to see if it truly fits into the ranks with the rest of the line-up. With a price tag of $399.99 from Newegg.com and sporting a total of eight PCIe x16 mechanical slots (that's $50 per slot), we will take our shot at finding out if this is really worth your time and money.