MSI Big Bang XPOWER Intel X58 motherboard review

2010 has been a strong year for MSI so far. They have been releasing some amazing products, such as the R5870 Lightning which not only scored very highly on KitGuru but left us feeling that it was one of the best video cards ever made.

Today we are going to look at the latest product from MSI, the Big Bang XPower Motherboard. This is a X58 Socket 1366 motherboard and the specification list is simply staggering. At £270 inc vat in the UK, its certainly not aimed at the faint of heart – this is a high end enthusiast grade board for people who want the ultimate performance product.

As with the R5870 Lightning we reviewed, the Big Bang is built with Military Class components and to the highest standard possible. When you hear that this meets the temperature requirements of US Department of Defense MIL-PRF-39003L standard, you know they mean business. They are keen to mention on their literature that this is ‘the same class of components as used on NASA satellites or space shuttles'.

Buzzwords aside, what you can be sure is that the MSI Big Bang board is accepting no compromises and while the price is high, it is clear that MSI are targeting the Asus Republic of Gamers audience by offering a similarly specified board.

The MSI Big Bang XPower board supports up to six single slot graphics cards for extreme multimonitor use and it also will cope with QUAD SLi and Crossfire X configurations from both nVidia and ATI. Extreme overclocking is also supported as MSI have included a second 8 pin CPU connector to the motherboard for increased stability. The same goes for graphics cards, as there is an additional 6 pin PCI-e on the board for overclocking stability.

The MSI board is supplied in a huge box with a very cool ‘big bang' concept, with shattering surfaces exploding outwards.

The box is a gatefold design which opens from the right and it contains a plethora of information on all the component technology encorporated into the design. This would be information overload for many users in a store, but it is nice to see a company trying to get across all the benefits their product will bring to the customer.

The main box opens to reveal two smaller boxes inside, one containing the motherboard and the other containing all the extras.

There are manuals, overclocking guides, driver discs, european versions of the manual as well as installation guides. They have left no rock unturned.

We think this is one of the most comprehensive bundles we have seen in our labs to date. There are enough cables to build several systems, and there are various SLI connectors to cover a multitude of configurations.

There is a THX certified sound card supplied (Quantum Wave) as well which slots onto the motherboard, just above the first graphics card slot and MSI also supply an OC Dashboard unit which we will look at later.

Sometimes we dont see enough SATA cables included with some motherboard bundles, but we certainly can't say the same for MSI. They also include converters to help with a system configuration.

A USB2 expansion slot bracket as well as another for eSATA. We are very impressed with this bundle, it has even put the ASUS boards we have looked at recently to shame.

The board really is a stunning looking design, with black and blue accented slots, it is also difficult to miss the six Gen2 PCIEx16 slots. There is passive cooling galore all over the PCB. The NEC USB 3.0 controller is called D720200f1 and there are a pair of Realtek RTL8111DL chips for LAN. There is also a VIA VT6315 1394 PCIE host controller onboard.

This impressive looking passive cooler keeps the ICH10R chipset operating within expected parameters and as you can see, there are eight sata ports, two of these are white and are SATA 6gbps ports. Next to the sata ports are plugs for the v-kit which means you can check voltages directly rather than just use software solutions. You can check CPU, VTTD, DDR, IOH and ICH voltages. Plug six is ground.

At the bottom right above there is an LED which will show post codes and explain any errors. There is also a little blue panel here with four movable switches, these allow the user to increase voltages across a range of components.

• Switch one is for CPU voltage
• Switch two is for QPI voltage
• Switch three is for DRAM Voltage
• Switch four is for IOH Voltage

The motherboard also is home to touch sensitive buttons. Central to these is the O.C. Genie button which, when pressed will cause it to light up and next time you start the board will automatically overclock your system. To the right of this button is a reset and power touch sensitive section and to the left are + and – keys which allow the user to change the base clock of the system while it is up and running during Windows. To the left of these is a pin out area for a Firewire bracket and a Trusted Platform Module.

As we mentioned earlier there are six PCI-e x16 expansion slots which offer various combinations of graphics card configurations. Obviously single card is supported but you can run 2x SLI, 3x SLI, Quad x Sli and Crossfire X. When you use two cards in SLI or Crossfire X the first and fourth PCI-e slots are used and they will both run in 16x bandwidth. Using all six means they will run in a x8, x4, x4, x8, x4, x4 configuration.

There is a single 6 pin power plug here which supplies additional power to the graphics cards, if you have one spare obviously from your PSU.

Beside the PCI-e x16 slots is a single PCI-e x1 slot which can be used to support the supplied Quantum Wave sound card.

On the panel there are five USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two e-Sata ports (one is a hybrid of E-SATA/USB 2.0), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a firewire port, two PS/2 ports (keyboard and mouse). There is also a CMOS reset button and a plug for the MSI OC dashboard. Audio is supplied by the dedicated sound card.

This is a Quantum Wave audio processing unit which combines Creative EAX Advanced HD 5.0 with THX Trustudio PC. MSI say this delivers a quality level previous unheard on other motherboards. It is a 7:1 high definition card.

There are no capacitors around the 1366 socket because MSI are using Highly conductive capacitors (Hi-c Cap). These have a very long life span, rated to be eight times that of Solid Capacitors with improved thermal capabilities. To make matters even better the core of these are Tantalum based which is a stable, rare material.

MSI use Super Ferrite Chokes (SFC's) which use a Ferrite core that is Super permeable – meaning they have a 30% higher capacity, higher overclocking potential and operate at 35c lower temperatures.

There is also an area next to the ram slots (video above) which is a series of LED's showing the current level of power phase the CPU is taking. There are also LED's for the QPI, DDR and IOH power phases.

The Bios has a structure common to other MSI boards I have used, which is reassuring as I love the MSI bios layout, it is so easy to navigate and normally lends itself well to easy overclocking. I use MSI boards all the time for our AMD test beds.

Above we can see the core i7 920 D0 stepping CPU, which is one of our favourites – this particular one hits 4.2ghz with relative ease.

We are pleased to see the bios update option is included on this board, it is one of our favourite features on the MSI boards, as you can flash a bios easily from a USB drive without a hitch. I have had to do this before when I was using a 1055T on an older bios. Its a life saver.

Various options for CPU related functions, hyperthreading, power saving options as well as overspeed protection.

The overclocking panels offer a familar structure which is extremely straightforward to work with. You will notice this is very similar in layout to the AMD 1055T overclocking article we published recently.

Various memory options are available and support for low VDroop (Viagra for motherboards) – this helps massively when overclocking to raise stability.

Phase control options as well as Green power Genie readouts.

A good place to always check after the first system build. With detailed temperature and voltage readouts. The bios is pretty accurate according to our diode setup, its only overreading by 1c.

In here you can configure your boot sequence as well as changing boot options. We have our operating system installed on a Corsair 32GB USB drive for installation speed, you need to change priority to ensure it boots from USB first however.

When testing the MSI Big Bang Motherboard we used a selection of components we know a large portion of our audience will own. We also wanted to select components we know will overclock well later – so we can test the motherboard limits.

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 (default)
Motherboard: MSI Big Bang XPower
Comparison Motherboard: eVGA X58 SLI
Memory: Kingston DDR3 1600 6GB Kit
Monitor: LaCie 730
Cooler: Thermaltake Contac29 Cooler
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB Sata 32MB
Power Supply: Enermax Mod87+ 700W
Graphics: HIS 5870 icooler V Turbo
Chassis: Open Bench configuration

Thermal Diodes
Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Keithley Integra 2700

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Catalyst 10.6
3DMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage
Super Pi
FRAPS Professional
SiSoftware Sandra 2010
Cinebench 11.5
KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4)
3D Studio Max 2011
Handbrake
Encoding
Colin McRae Dirt 2
Alien V Predator
Crysis Warhead

All our results are gathered from five individual runs to analyze and remove any possible result abnormalities.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Very close results when compared with the excellent eVGA X58 motherboard, the MSI just edged it, but its very minor indeed.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

There is just under 3 seconds difference between the MSI and the eVGA board which while not a huge amount , does show some bandwidth benefits with the MSI configuration.

Encoding is something most of us do on a fairly regular basis and it is a good way to monitor any fluctuations in performance across the range of motherboards on test today.

One of our favourite tools is the excellent, free Handbrake.  HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

We extracted a VOB file from the DVD of AVATAR and then converted it to MP4 at quality settings.

Overall there is a five second difference between the boards which would translate to a benefit of several hours over a weeks intensive encoding work.

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.

We enabled maximum settings, including hardware tessellated animated crowds and dynamic water via ULTRA settings.

Very minor gains from the MSI board with around half a frame extra in the average and minimum frame rate results.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

The game was tested at 1920×1200 which are the resolutions which the high end target audience will utilise. All in game settings were maximised – which is exactly how high end gamers will want their HD5870 gaming experience to be.

Again there are very small gains to be noted between the motherboards powering the HD5870 graphics card, in favour of the MSI Big Bang.

Crysis Warhead, like the original, Crysis, is based in a future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. The single-player campaign has the player assume the role of (Former SAS) Delta Force operator Sergeant Michael Sykes, referred to in-game by his call sign, Psycho. Psycho’s arsenal of futuristic weapons builds on those showcased in Crysis, with the introduction of Mini-SMGs which can be dual-wielded, a six-shot grenade launcher equipped with EMP grenades, and the destructive, short ranged Plasma Accumulator Cannon (PAX). The highly versatile Nanosuit returns.

In Crysis Warhead, the player fights North Korean and extraterrestrial enemies, in many different locations, such as a tropical island jungle, inside an “Ice Sphere”, an underground mining complex, which is followed by a convoy train transporting an unknown alien object held by the North Koreans, and finally, to an airfield. Like Crysis, Warhead uses Microsoft’s new API, Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) for graphics rendering.

In the last of our game tests its pretty clear by now that the MSI board has some slight advantages in a gaming environment when compared with our reference eVGA X58 solution.

Overclocking is often seen as a dark art and MSI have attempted to take some of the effort out of this by the inclusion of an OC Genie button on the motherboard.

Simply shut down the system, hit the button and it will light up in blue and work its magic. The chip will then automatically try and set the optimal overclock in a matter of a few seconds.

By doing this our system was overclocked to 4ghz, almost a 1.4ghz overclock without any effort ! We managed to improve upon this by raising the voltage to 1.425 and then our Core i7 920 was stable at 4.2ghz. To be honest, for most people that OC Genie button is going to be a lifesaver as we couldn't believe how well it actually worked, giving a rock solid overclocked system with minimal effort and huge gains in performance also. We would recommend you use a good cooler for this however, not the reference Intel solution.

We believe that the Big Bang product will not only be a great overclocking board for the experienced enthusiast, but that it will help inexperienced users to get to grips with overclocking. Studying the bios changes and settings required to get the most from the system. They even supply an overclocking guide in the box which gives a lot of basic pointers.

Power consumption is important to a wide audience today and we measured the drain at the wall when idle and loaded. To load the system we ran a game of Crysis which stresses both CPU and graphics under real world conditions.

This is an interesting result because we can clearly see the benefits by using Hi-c Caps on the MSI board. The system takes around 18 watts less under load when compared directly with the eVGA product.

There is no doubting that the MSI Big Bang XPower is one of the most impressive motherboards on today's market. They have accepted no compromises and from the ground up they have designed the product to cater to the most demanding of enthusiast user.

The bundle supplied is extremely thorough, with a plethora of manuals and extras to cater for every user skill level, we particularly liked the overclocking guide. Many companies allow for bios overclocking but include so many warnings with their literature that many inexperienced users will be immediately unsure if it is worth the risk …. not MSI, they really do want to promote the features and are trying to educate people by explaining how it all works.

The OC Genie button is a great touch and many people will be happy with the automated end result as it pushes the system hard, but not right to the limit.

The build quality is as high as we have seen with attention to detail in all areas, from the inclusion of Hic Capacitors, onboard LED readouts and heavy duty passive cooling. If you are an enthusiast with a love for multiple monitors then the support for up to 6 graphics cards is going to be surely appealing. When compared with the class leading eVGA X58 board it performed to a slightly higher level while consuming less power, a intoxicating combination.

All this luxury and power comes at a cost of £270 inc vat in the UK, but we actually feel this is good value for money as there are no weaknesses with the product whatsoever.

In closing, the MSI Big Bang XPower is probably the finest motherboard we have tested to date and is verifying our theory that 2010 is the year of MSI. If you have deep pockets then make sure to pair this board up with the incredible R5870 Lightning.

KitGuru says: A quality product with unparallelled overclocking capabilities and support for every featureset on the market. Overclocking is also a cinch.

Discuss in our forum over here

Become a Patron!