MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard

We see if the MSI Big Bang X58 XPower is the start of a new MSI universe, or if it will end up being a black hole that MSI cannot get out of.

Published
Updated
Manufacturer: MSI
21 minutes & 25 seconds read time

Introduction


MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard 01




Update: After running into some odd performance related issues when first testing our board in conjunction with FutureMark's PCMark Vantage, we contacted MSI to see if they could give reason for what was crippling the board in this testing suite. MSI hadn't gotten back to us until just a short time ago.

Thankfully, these performance oddities are not a trait of the board itself. We have ascertained that it was a driver specific issue and with the board being of such a high calibre and pleasing us in many other areas, we figured it was well worth a second chance.

With that said, we have re-ran our PCMark Vantage tests using updated drivers to make it clear that the board itself is not of hindrance; rather, the drivers were holding it back. You can view our full update with test results here.

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Back in the early days of the slot A Athlons, there was only one company that you could trust for both performance and stability. It was not ASUS, it was not GIGABYTE; it was MSI. Their boards were quite simply ahead of the game. When the Gold Finger devices came out, again MSI was at the front of the others in support for advanced cooling and a few other features. But, after that MSI sort of went into hiding. Their products dropped in quality and even in prevalence on the market.

Today things appear to be changing; MSI has pushed out their Big Bang line of high performance motherboards. They are working to re-establish themselves in the component market. Products like the R5870 Lightning and Cyclone are getting the word out from the DIY crowd again.

We have the Big Bang XPower board in for a look. This board features six full x16 PCIe slots, THX and EAX Audio, Hi-quality caps, chokes and a host of other items that are sure to get you going. Let's take a look and see what we can get out of it.

The Box and What's Inside


Package and Contents

The Big Bang X58 XPower box is a little different from MSI's usual packaging. It is kind of eye catching. The front is glossy black with a gold design. There is very little other decoration on the front of the box. We do see a few logos along the bottom edge, but there is not a ton of the usual hard-sell.

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For those of you that miss that marketing, fear not. After you open up the front flap you will find a bunch of it. This is in addition to a glimpse of XPower through a plastic window.

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The back contains more of the heavy sell that we saw on the inside of the front flap.

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Inside the box are two familiar looking black boxes. These hold the Big Bang XPower and all the goodies MSI has provided you.

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After pulling these boxes out, I found something very interesting. There was a book and document in a sleeve that seemed to indicate how well this particular Big Bang XPower should perform.

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The document listed a set of specs as well as a high BCLK and the multiplier they used to get there. There was a disclaimer saying that due to differences in hardware you might not see the same results, but I am also thinking this is a good thing.

I spoke with MSI and while they said the certification was at this time press only, they are considering to do this for all of their upper end motherboards. I think this would be a very good move.

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You do get a huge load of loot with the XPower, though, as you can see from the stack we piled up in the picture above. One of the interesting things that came in the box is something we normally only see in a GIGABYTE box. This is a powered external SATA port with a Molex power connector.

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MSI has also thrown in some nice little extenders for their voltage monitoring points on the board. These allow you to connect your leads a little more efficiently.

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One item that MSI has added in gave me a little bit of a laugh. This is the OC Dashboard. I was not laughing because they included this; I was laughing at what it looked like. It looked almost exactly like my garage door opener. I hope that MSI refines this part and makes it look as good as it functions (we will cover this below).

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Last on our list of fun gadgets is the Quantum Wave audio card. This is a THX, EAX 5.0 and Alchemy laden sound board that should help the audiophiles in the crowd enjoy their games more.

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The Motherboard


The Board

MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard 01


The Big Bang X58 XPower is an nice looking board. MSI has opted for the dark metallic look for items that would normally be chrome. As usual, it follows the ATX form factor with a few minor exceptions.

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One of the big exceptions that we will talk about later are the six full x16 PCIe slots you see.

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But before we get into all of that, we need to look at a few very interesting items that are showing up near the CPU and memory slots. You will notice that the usual capacitors that clutter this area are gone. They have been replaced with Hi-C Caps. These are capacitors that have a titanium core in them. This allows for higher conductivity. They have a higher thermal envelope which results in a longer life.

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Another departure from the usual ATX form factor is the inclusion of an extra 8-pin 12V aux power connector and also a 6-pin connector. These help to provide stable power to components that need them during both normal and overclocked usage.

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As we mentioned above, there are six x16 PCIe slots on the Big Bang XPower. However, as usual not all are fully x16. Of the six that are on the board, the first and fourth are full x16, the third and fifth are x8 and the second and sixth are x4. Sort of confusing really, but I guess in the end it all works out.

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Drawing our eyes away from the six PCIe x16 (mechanical) slots on the board, we do see some very nice features on the other side. One of these we talked about in passing earlier. This is the voltage monitoring point. It is the big blue block near the SATA ports; here you can check the actual voltage going through the board with a multi-meter instead of using a (usually inaccurate) software app that reads data from the BIOS.

You can also see the SATA 3.0 ports. These are the two white ports that are not at a 90 degree angle. You can set these up in RAID in the BIOS if you are into that sort of thing.

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You can also see a set of four dipswitches. These are the V Switch controls. They allow you to extend the voltage range available in the BIOS for overclocking. These are right next to a pair of diagnostic LEDs.

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When I first saw this area I actually thought that MSI had left the power, reset and clock adjustment buttons off. But after looking closely I realized they are still there, they are just contact closure switches at the board level. You can actually see the contacts that your finger will close to complete the circuit and activate the switch. It is a pretty neat idea, but I worry about other items contacting these that might be conductive enough to activate them when in a case.

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This shot I threw in because it is a nice image and shows in a very graphical way the 16-power phases available for the CPU.

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Ah, the I/O ports. Here we find what are becoming the standard ports for an ATX motherboard. You have USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire, e-SATA, Powered E-SATA and audio. There is another port and button that are important, though. The port is for the OC Dashboard while the button is to clear CMOS.

The Big Bang X58 XPower is a nice board. Although it is a little cramped, the layout is not too bad. There has obviously been some thought put into this design. The little details spell this out quite clearly. We hope that this attention to detail and hard work play out in the testing that we get to shortly.

BIOS and Overclocking


BIOS

Once you get inside the BIOS you see that MSI has added in a number of fun options for tweaking your board and CPU.

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Even after going through all the options on the page, there are a few sub-menus to get through.

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And Advanced Voltage control. I would have thought they would put the CPU PLL voltage on the main M.I.T. page, but instead it got listed in the Advanced Voltage section.

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MSI has added the ability to tweak the cores individually using their Turbo Boost configuration page.

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Another interesting feature is the BIOS enabled power settings. These are in addition to the normal power management features found on the board.

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As you can see, there are a lot of items integrated on to the MSI Big Bang X58 XPower.

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Overclocking

I have to say that the XPower was one of the easiest boards that I have used to OC my 980X. I was surprised at how quickly I was up and over 4.3GHz with this. I was even able to enter Windows at 4.4GHz. These are speeds that I have not been able to hit before with this CPU. The closest I have gotten before was at 4.238GHz on a GIGABYTE X58-UD7.

I do think that with more time and tinkering I could have gotten much more out of the XPower than I did here. Our final stable OC for the MSI XPower was 166x26 for a clock of 4.318GHz.

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You can see the validation for the i7 980X on the MSI XPower here.


OC Dashboard

We did not use the OC Dashboard much for our testing. It was not that it did not do a good job, it was that it was hard to read and ended up being more hassle than it was worth. It was great for looking at boot codes and some other basic data, but to actually use it for overclocking was just too much.

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To get almost anywhere you had to hunt around for the menus. Once you were there you would often have to leave to get to another area to finish up what you wanted to do in the first place. In the end we left it on the time and that was that.

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I think that MSI needs to take a look at this and improve upon the design. Personally I feel that a much larger display with a combination of pre-set and soft buttons would work best. Also, the display needs to be able to show more information at one time. Maybe an LCD with a backlight would be cleaner and better.


As all overclocking results are dependent on the hardware you use, your results may vary. Results of our overclocking tests are included in the performance section with the stock scores.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.

Test System Setup and Comments


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The MSI X58 XPower was a good board to work with, but there were some issues that we ran into that were not sorted by the time we were finished with this article.

One of the first ones was a high-pitched whine from the electronics when the system was under load. Inside a case this would probably go unnoticed, but on our open test bench this was quite irritating.

The second issue dealt with the USB 3.0 system. For some reason it did not like to recognize our Seagate PS110 USB 3.0 external drive. It would see it perfectly when attached to a USB 2.0 port, but not when we plugged it into the USB 3.0 controller. It would take as many as four tries before we got anything. Then no matter what power management settings we used, the board would turn the drive off after a few minutes.

As we mentioned before, the OC Dashboard was sort of useless to us due to the size of the screen and the need to hunt around the menus for just about anything you wanted to do.

Synthetic Tests - Part I


With any system you will want to see a combination of synthetic testing and real-world. Synthetics give you a static, easily repeatable testing method that can be compared across multiple platforms. For our synthetic tests we use Everest Ultimate, Sisoft Sandra, Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage, Cinebench as well as HyperPi. Each of these covers a different aspect of performance or a different angle of a certain type of performance.


Memory Bandwidth

Memory is a big part of current system performance. In most systems slow or flakey memory performance will impact almost every type of application you run. To test memory we use a combination of Sisoft Sandra, Everest and HyperPi 0.99.


Sisoft Sandra

Version and / or Patch Used: 2010c 1626
Developer Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
Product Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.net
Buy It Here

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The memory bandwidth numbers are not bad at all and are right in line with what we have come to expect from the X58 and 980X combination.


Everest Ultimate

Version and / or Patch Used: 5.30.1983
Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com
Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com
Buy It Here

Everest Ultimate is a suite of tests and utilities that can be used for system diagnostics and testing. For our purposes here we use their memory bandwidth test and see what the theoretical performance is.

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Stock Memory Performance


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Overclocked Memory Performance


Everest backs up our findings from Sandra.


HyperPi 0.99

Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99
Developer Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br
Product Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br
Download It Here

HyperPi is a front end for SuperPi that allows for multiple concurrent instances of SuperPi to be run on each core recognized by the system. It is very dependent on CPU to memory to HDD speed. The faster these components, the faster it is able to figure out the number Pi to the selected length.

For our testing we use the 32M run. This means that each of the four physical and four logical cores for the i7 and the four physical cores of the i5 is trying to calculate the number Pi out to 32 million decimal places. Each "run" is a comparative to ensure accuracy and any stability or performance issues in the loop mentioned above will cause errors in calculation.

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Hmm; at stock speeds the XPower does not do that well for our HyperPi run. However, when we push the CPU up to 4.3GHz it manages to pull ahead by a decent margin.

Synthetic Tests - Part II


Disk Drive Controller

The system drive controller is an important part of system performance. In most modern boards your drive controller will run off of the PCI-e bus. The PCI-e bus performance can be affected by poor trace layout as well as many other design choices that show up on different boards.

For testing we use Sisoft's Sandra and Everest.


SiSoft Sandra

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Well, the MSI Big Bang XPower did not do as well as we would have liked to see in terms of HDD performance. It is still very fast, but even when overclocked it is not as fast as the other boards we tested.


Everest

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Stock HDD Performance


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Overclocked HDD Performance


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Stock USB 3.0 Performance


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Overclocked USB 3.0 Performance


Again, our Everest testing backs up our findings with Sandra. We could expect this to show up in reduced performance in Lightwave, AutoGK, and as we saw above, HyperPi.

Synthetic Tests - Part III


Overall System performance and Gaming

Here is where we dig out the FutureMark tests.


PCMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.0.0
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/
Product Homepage: www.futuremark.com
Buy It Here

For overall system performance we use PCMark Vantage. This is run in both x86 and x64 mode to give the best indication of performance.

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Ugh, I really cannot say much more than that. The scores we see here are terrible. The funny thing is that I was unable to find a direct cause for this. I tinkered with several settings in the BIOS, removed a few utilities and even rolled back the GPU driver to 10.4. None of this helped. We have an open ticket with MSI to see if we can find the cause of this issue and resolve it.


3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/
Product Homepage: www.futuremark.com
Buy It Here

For synthetic gaming tests we used the industry standard and overlockers bragging tool 3DMark Vantage. This is a test that strives to mimic the impact modern games have on a system. Futuremark went a long way to change from the early days of graphics driven tests to a broader approach including physics, AI and more advanced graphics simulations. 3DMark Vantage uses the DX10 API in addition to having support for PhysX. As we are no longer using an NVIDIA GPU for testing (at least until we can get a GTX 4xx card) you will only see the CPU based PhysX results in the scores. For testing we use the Performance test run.

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The Big Bang XPower does a decent job of handling the demands of 3DMark Vantage. However, there is still something that is not quite right here. We are seeing decent scores, but they are just a little off from where they really should be.


Cinebench R11. x64

Version and / or Patch Used: R11.5 x64
Developer Homepage: http://www.maxon.net/
Product Homepage: www.maxon.net
Download It Here

Cinebench is a synthetic rendering tool developed by Maxon. Maxon is the same company that developed Cinema4D, another industry leading 3D Animation application. Cinebench R11.5 tests your systems ability to render across a single and multiple CPU cores. It also tests your systems ability to process OpenGL information.

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With the power of a 980X and 6GB of good memory, the XPower makes short work of the CPU and OpenGL rendering tests here.

Real-World Tests - Part I


Real-world testing allows us to see how well a product will perform when used in the same manner as it would be in your house or office. It is an important side to performance testing as it can uncover hidden glitches in the way a product performs.

It is especially true when testing a mainboard; there are so many components of a board that have to interact that any problems between parts can cause a failure of the whole.

For real-world testing we use some common applications and functions. We test with LightWave 3D for rendering performance, AutoGK for transcoding from DVD to AVI and two games for gaming testing.


Rendering

Rendering of 3D Animation is a system intensive endeavor. You need a good CPU, memory and HDD speed to get good rendering times. For our testing we use LightWave 3D. This software from Newtek is an industry standard and has several pre-loaded scenes for us to use.


LightWave 3D

Version and / or Patch Used: 9.6
Developer Homepage: http://www.newtek.com
Product Homepage: http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/
Buy It Here

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Although the scores here look really close (and they are), it is important to remember that animation is not measured in single frames. It is measured in frame per second (usually 28 FPS). This means that for an average 3 minute commercial there are around 5040 frames. At this number of frames per render a few seconds becomes very important in terms of performance and productivity.

Unfortunately the MSI X58 Big Bang XPower would not be a good choice for heavy 3D rendering, at least not with Lightwave 3D.


AutoGK

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.55
Developer Homepage: http://www.autogk.me.uk/
Product Homepage: http://www.autogk.me.uk/
Download It Here

AutoGK stands for Auto Gordian Knot; it is a suite of transcoding tools that are compiled into an easy to install and use utility. It allows you to transcode non-protected DVDs and other media to Xvid or Divx format. For our testing purposes we use a non-DRM restricted movie that is roughly 2 hours in length. This is transcoded to a single Xvid AVI at 100% quality.

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Oddly enough, the XPower did pretty well at transcoding. This is despite the slower than expected HDD performance.

Real-World Tests Part II


Here we have our real gaming tests. Each of the games we chose uses multiple cores and GPUs. They are able to stress the system through use of good AI. Both have decent positional audio that adds impact to the sound subsystem of the board. We ran each game through the level or parts listed and recorded frame per second using FRAPS. This brings the whole game into play.

*** A word on gaming as a motherboard test; ***

Despite the fact that most games are very GPU limited, we are still noticing HDD and even audio creating issues in gaming performance. Because of this you may see differences in the number of frames rendered per second between different boards. Usually the difference is very small, but occasionally, because of bad tracing, poor memory or HDD performance, this difference is significant. The issues are often more prevalent in older versions of DirectX, but can still pop up in DX10 and 11.



Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (DX9)

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0
Timedemo or Level Used: First combat until the school is cleared
Developer Homepage: http://www.infinityward.com
Product Homepage: http://modernwarfare2.infinityward.com
Buy It Here

Most of you know about the game Modern Warfare 2, it caused quite a bit of controversy in the latter half of 2009. The game is a first person shooter with a heavy combat emphasis. It follows the events in the first Modern Warfare very closely and brings back several characters from the original.

As with most games in the Call of Duty franchise, it features a heavy AI load. This is not because of a complex AI routine, but more due to the sheer number of enemies in any given combat situation. It is also our single DX9 based game in our testing suite. Settings are shown below.

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We did something a little different this time around. Instead of focusing on the average FPS, we are taking a look at the minimum ones that each rig was able to achieve.

Here we see a different story. Granted, all are still faster than a human eye can detect, but we do see the XPower doing quite well in this test.


Far Cry 2 (DX10)

Version and / or Patch Used: V1.00
Timedemo or Level Used: Clearing the Safe house through to the Rescue
Developer Homepage: http://www.ubi.com
Product Homepage: http://farcry.us.ubi.com

Buy It Here

Far Cry 2 is a large sandbox style game. There are no levels here, so as you move about the island you are on you do not have to wait for the "loading" sign to go away. It is mission driven, so each mission is what you would normally think of as the next "level".

In the game you take the role of a mercenary who has been sent to kill the Jackal. Unfortunately your malaria kicks in and you end up being found by him. Long story short, you become the errand boy for a local militia leader and run all over the island doing his bidding. Settings we used for testing are shown below.

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Far Cry 2 is a very close race. Any one of these systems would offer great performance. It is nice to see that the XPower will not slow you down at all with this game.


Battlefield Bad Company 2 (DX11)

Version and / or Patch Used: V1.00
Timedemo or Level Used: From washing up on the beach to the mine fields.
Developer Homepage: http://www.ea.com/
Product Homepage: http://badcompany2.ea.com/
Buy It Here

Battlefield Bad Company is another sequel and also another game "franchise". Bad Company 2 is also our DX11 Shooter game. The game follows a fictitious B company team on a mission to recover a Japanese defector. This puts you back in World War II (at least for the beginning of the game) while the multi-player game is centered on much more modern combat. For our testing we used the single player mode. Settings are shown below.

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Interestingly, at stock speeds the XPower struggles with this game. However, once we let the CPU loose we see some very impressive numbers that put it up at the top of the list.


Gaming Conclusion

Gaming as a test is difficult. On the one hand you can say this board or that board is faster or better for gaming based on the strict numbers. On the other, you have to show that the differences are so minor they are often unnoticeable between systems. Using gaming as a test requires actual game play to see how all the subsystems come into play; from the audio, to memory/HDD (for level load times) and even CPU. Once you put these into the equation you have a good picture of how well a board can game.

With the XPower, while we saw that in many cases it was not the fastest, it did have an upper hand in audio quality and level load times (oddly enough). We had no audio issues or stutters during the game while the audio CODEC tried to catch up.

Power Usage and Heat Tests


Power Consumption

We are now able to find out what kind of power is being used by our test system and the associated graphics cards installed. Keep in mind; it tests the complete system (minus LCD monitor, which is plugged directly into an AC wall socket).

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The power draw at idle on the XPower is very impressive compared to the other boards in our test group. When we put the system under load, things change quickly, though.


Heat Generation

As a new measure, we are now monitoring the heat generation from the key components on the motherboard; this being the Northbridge, Southbridge (if it contains one) as well as the Mosfets around the CPU. The results are recorded at idle and load during the power consumption tests.

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The heat generated by the X58 chipset is not that much compared to what we saw from the average X48.

Final Thoughts




Update: After running into some odd performance related issues when first testing our board in conjunction with FutureMark's PCMark Vantage, we contacted MSI to see if they could give reason for what was crippling the board in this testing suite. MSI hadn't gotten back to us until just a short time ago.

Thankfully, these performance oddities are not a trait of the board itself. We have ascertained that it was a driver specific issue and with the board being of such a high calibre and pleasing us in many other areas, we figured it was well worth a second chance.

With that said, we have re-ran our PCMark Vantage tests using updated drivers to make it clear that the board itself is not of hindrance; rather, the drivers were holding it back. You can view our full update with test results here.

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MSI is re-inventing themselves. We said this before and it bears repeating. They are working hard to overcome the issues they had a few years ago with product performance, stability and quality. We were very pleasantly surprised that all of our questions, comments and concerns were addressed. Even the ones that could not be fixed right away were and still are being worked on. The PCMark issue is still not resolved, but as we did not see this translate into poor real world performance, we are not overly worried about it. In the end the board performed well with a few exceptions.

There are a few other items on MSI's list that need to be fixed on the XPower, but the only one that really is a consumer issue is the USB 3.0 issue. From what I am hearing, this one is actually due to drivers and not a problem with the board. We intend to follow up on this one and see how MSI does on resolving the problems we noted in a timely manner.

But again, it is important to remember that other than the PCMark issue and the USB 3.0 problem, the XPower performed very well and was very overclockable. The fact that we hit 4.3GHz on this board with our 980X on nothing but air is great. We tried to get this far on a couple of other boards and at this speed could not even get into Windows, much less run tests.

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Update: PCMark Vantage re-visited


PCMark Vantage re-visited

There are times when new things are not always better things. When we received our sample of the MSI Big Bang X58 Xpower motherboard we also received a burned DVD with drivers on it. There was no retail driver installation DVD. It turns out that these drivers were not full release versions. In fact, the Intel INF driver was not even available on Intel's website. The current version there is 9.1.1.1019, whilst the version on the disk was 9.1.2.1007.

This version caused some pretty big troubles for us during our testing. It turns out the 9.1.2.1007 drivers do not like PCMark at all. As you read in our original PCMark Vantage test results, we saw simply awful scores on this one test. The rest of the tests were pretty much right on the money.

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You can see the burned DVD here


After working with MSI for the better part of a week and trying two brand new BIOS files, we finally started playing with drivers. We uninstalled and reinstalled the USB 3.0 drivers, the Marvell drivers, the audio drivers and then we attacked the INF.

When we went to reinstall them we found that the version numbers were way off. This was not what we expected; after all, the installation utility looked like the final version and everything else worked. On a whim we let the installer overwrite the newer files with the older ones from MSI's website and to our great surprise the scores suddenly fell where they were supposed to.

So, for now we can show you that the MSI Big Bang Xpower can run PCMark Vantage. It is not as fast as the ASUS board at stock speeds (for PCMark), but it is certainly very agile and gives us good results. We also saw when using the proper retail drivers it fixed the issues we had with USB 3.0. So the moral in this story; never assume the disk sent to you has the right drivers. Check and double check!

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PCMark with Intel INF 9.1.2.1007


MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard 49

PCMark x86 Suite stock speeds with INF 9.1.1.1019


MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard 50

PCMark x64 Suite stock speeds with INF 9.1.1.1019


MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard 51

PCMark x86 Suite at 4.3GHz with INF 9.1.1.1019


MSI Big Bang XPower (X58 Express) Motherboard 52

PCMark x64 Suite at 4.3GHz with INF 9.1.1.1019


As you can see, it made a rather big difference and proved our initial feeling that the PCMark performance issue was something simple. We ran all of the other tests at stock speeds and they were within 3% of the original scores. We cannot tell you why this newer driver did not like PCMark Vantage, but it didn't and we can say that if you pick up one of these boards retail you will not have this issue, as the driver included with the retail drivers DVD is the 9.1.1.1019 that is on Intel's and MSI's website.

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