14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that Micro-Star International wants to reboot its Cougar Point chipset-based collection of motherboards by turning the Big Bang Marshall, its arguably most powerful mainboard, into a sort of flagship.
Users will no doubt have learned of the issues plaguing Intel's 6-Series Cougar Point chipset and how that led to all companies stopping sales of any motherboard or notebook based on it.
In fact, the discovery of the design flaw was made long enough ago that Intel had time to produce the first batch of B3 Stepping chipsets.
The MSI Big Bang Marshall with a B3 stepping has now been officially revealed, a P67 platform with more PCI Express slots that people could possibly need (save for really ambitious enthusiasts).
To be more specific, 8 PCI Express x16 slots are available (leading to the large form factor), four of which can be disabled.
Basically, gamers will easily be able to enact up to 4-way SLI or CrossFireX multi-GPU setups.
Needless to say, the rest of the feature set is just as high-aimed, with four DDR3 memory slots and eight SATA ports (four 3.0 Gbps and four 6.0 Gbps).
Of course, being an overclocking platform, Big Bang Marshall has the full set of endurance and stability-enhancing components, like a passive cooler (with 8mm SuperPipe), 24-phase DrMOS PWM and Military Class II components.
Additionally, the OC Genie II one-button overclocking feature will automatically boost the performance of the entire system.
Of course, for those in need of more direct control, OC Dashboard is bundled and allows for on the fly setting adjustment, so customers can freely experiment, knowing that the Multi-BIOS and Click BIOS features built into the Marshall will enable them to revert to default settings should things go amiss.
Other features one may be interested in learning about are V-check points, the Winki 3 instant-on OS, 12 USB 3.0 ports (8 on the backplate) and dual Gigabit Ethernet.
Unfortunately, the press release did not hold any sort of pricing information.