14 DAY TRIAL // Yet another motherboard has made its appearance, in an unofficial capacity anyhow, namely the MSI Bang XPower II, which might just be the company's strongest platform yet, or at least very close to the top of the line.
The mere fact that it supports LGA 2011 CPUs is enough of a statement to the performance it can reach.
After all, the Sandy Bridge-E central processing units are no slouches, and the two strongest have already been spotted on retail.
As such, MSI only had to make sure its motherboard had all the components needed to enable those processors to let loose.
One of the things that stands out easily is the presence of eight memory slots, which sets the maximum DDR3 capacity to a solid 64 GB.
That's more than most people, if not everyone, could possibly have a use for, but that never seems to stop some from actually going all out and building real computing monsters.
Of course, there wouldn't be much point to a machine with so much memory if it didn't have the same level of graphics.
After all, games, graphics design programs and other such applications need their video rendering capabilities.
To satisfy any and all prospective buyers, MSI threw in seven PCI Express x16 slots.
Granted, only two of them seem to be x16, while the rest are x8 and, since the new Intel CPUs don't actually support so many PCI Express lanes, some of those switches on the board are probably used to manually disable at least part of them.
Other specifications include four SATA II ports (SATA 3.0 Gbps) and six SATA III (SATA 6.0 Gbps), plus voltage check points, on-board Direct OC and Multi BIOS buttons (among others), the OC Genie and a variety of connectors on the I/O panel.
MSI's Big Bang XPower II has a 24-phase VRM design and some awkwardly placed connectors and pin headers. No price was mentioned, unfortunately.
