14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that motherboard makers are so anxious to unveil their own X58-based motherboards – even before Intel's official introduction – that some of them have already announced the upcoming products. We have already seen ASUS rushing to announce the new Rampage II Extreme board two days ago, and it now appears that one of the company's competitors, MSI to be more specific, has also officially introduced its upcoming X58-based Intel platform, with the new MSI Eclipse Series motherboard.
Now, there's a minor catch to all these announcements, since none of these mobo makers has explicitly mentioned the new X58 chipset or the support for Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors. However, it's difficult to draw a different conclusion once you take a quick look at the specifications and the pictures of said cards. This is the case with the new MSI Eclipse motherboard, which was introduced by the Taiwanese manufacturer to demonstrate its second generation DrMOS energy-saving feature, rather than the board's support for upcoming Intel processors.
As already stated, there's no specific mention of an X58 chipset on the board, but we aren't that easily fooled, especially if we’re to gather all the available info we have on the new Eclipse motherboard from MSI. From what we can see in the product's image, it has been built on a black PCB, and features six triple-channel DDR3-supporting memory DIMMs, three PCI Express X16 graphics slots with support for both SLI and CrossFireX configurations, two PCI-Express X1 slots and two PCI slots. One of the available PCI-Express X1 slots will be meant for the X-FI Xtreme Audio card, a feature that is available on most of the company's high-end motherboard lineup.
The Eclipse also features a few other of the company's proprietary technologies, including the second-generation DrMOS and MSI Green Power. Unfortunately, we have no specific details regarding the board's price tag, but these should become available when Intel officially announces the new X58 desktop platform.