14 DAY TRIAL // The consumer dream for unrestricted GPU combinations was made possible by LicidLogix' Hydra SoC and was later fulfilled by MSI, but it remains obvious that, for the largest part of the market, the dream is still out of reach. This is because the MSI Big Bang Fuzion, currently the only existing motherboard to incorporate Lucid's Hydra system-on-chip, is far from being the most affordable platform on the planet. End-users need not mourn, however, as reports have arisen suggesting that there will also be more affordable Hydra-powered motherboards on sale before long.
One of the two, the 870A-GD60 Hydra, has already been showcased at this year's CeBIT expo in Hanover, Germany. More recently, however, it was revealed that this was not the only approaching newcomer, with the second one being the P55-GD88 Hydra (P55A Hydra). In part, this board resembled the Big Bang Fuzion, as it comes with four DDR3 slots, two SATA 6.0Gbps ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio and USB 3.0 support. It also keeps the DrMOS, OC Genie and APS capabilities and uses the same chipset (P55), and will thus support the same range of high-end LGA 1156 central processing units.
Nevertheless, Micro-Star International was forced to give up part of its flagship's feature set in order to achieve its goal of affordability. Among the differences is the fact that the P55A Hydra has only two PCI Express x16 slots instead of three, for X-mode (AMD + NVIDIA GPUs), 2-way SLI and CrossFireX setups. Additionally, this model only employs Hi-c CAPs for the CPU.
Unfortunately, while it is implied that the newcomer's price will likely be of under 300 Euro, there is no way to know for sure what the final price tag will be. There is also no word on availability, which means that it may still be a month or two before MSI's project materializes.