MSI x79 Big-Bang xPower II Motherboard Review & BenchMarks ~ Saad Reviews (Reviews + Benchmarks)

MSI x79 Big-Bang xPower II Motherboard

Review & BenchMarks

As MSI always keep the latest technologies with their Mbos as they tried to make Overclocker happy with the performance, therefore not finding many reviews of new boards here. You will however find an influx of top-selling boards that were released at the time of launch, which have made it to market.

On the paperwork side of things we've got an absolute heap including manuals and guides alongside the Certificate of Quality & Stability in regards to the Military Class III feature. Along with all that we've also got the standard driver CD.

What we will be looking at today is how the board is styled, marketed and of course how it performs with a 3960X X79 processor. With a strong processor and a chipset that is focussed on consumers needing the most amount of power from their system, the Big Bang XPower II X79 motherboard should really be a strong contender, and that’s exactly what we hope to show, with the help of some overclocking functionality too.

Before we jump straight into the figures, we need to show the packaging and accessories that come included with a board of this calibre. After this, we can take a closer look at the board in more detail and then move on to the performance side of things.

On the connector side of things we've got voltage cables that let us check the voltage of certain areas via the V Check points along with M Connectors. On the SATA cable front we've got a total of eight as well as one eSATA cable, external power for a hard drive and I/O back plate.

Alongside all that we've got a bunch of SLI connectors in the bundle and two add-ons which include two USB 3.0 ports along with another add-on including a pair of eSATA ports

Once we have the stock performance pinned, we can move on to see how well this board performs under pressure, by taking a look at its overclocking performance at 4.6GHz in comparison to stock, as well as looking to see how far we can push past this.

Due to the price point and size of this board, we have eight DIMM slots (two per channel) as we would expect, though the position of the heatsinks does limit orientations of large CPU air coolers somewhat. If only four sticks of memory are entered, they do not use the nearest DIMM slots to the CPU, giving a little extra horizontal room. We have six fan headers on board – one CPU 4-pin to the top left of the socket, one 4-pin SYS just inside the right bank of DIMMs towards the middle of the board, one by the 24-pin ATX power connector, one on the bottom of the board, one to the left of the PCIe (blocked by a third GPU), and one to the left of the DIMMs. These can be controlled by the BIOS and in the OS.

Unlike other boards, the on-board power and reset buttons are in completely different places. The power button is situated in the top right, whereas the reset button is located along the bottom next to the ‘DirectOC’. Typically we see these features together (I would assume to aid in the internal routing) in either one of those spaces. The reset button location caught me off-guard while overclocking a couple of times – more on that later. Beneath the power button along the right hand side, below the 24-pin ATX connector is a series of easy-to-use voltage read points for testers and extreme overclockers. This is always a handy feature on a top end board – if it were on anything cheaper, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest it adds un-necessary cost for 99.9% of users, but it is more than appropriate on the Big Bang-XPower II.