MSI's Fuzion Fuses ATI and NVIDIA Graphics

The dream of combining the graphics capabilities of multiple graphics cards, regardless of manufacturer and model, is no longer just a dream now that MSI is finally offering its Big Bang Fuzion motherboard, powered by Lucid's Hydra 200 system-on-chip. The mainboard is already on display at CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany and, as a treat for the various visitors to its booth, Micro-Star International has also put together a system running both an NVIDIA-based and an AMD-based graphics card from the company's Lightning series.

We already managed to get a few close-up shots of the MSI Big Bang Fuzion motherboard and now we have been able to get close enough to the configuration that MSI is using in proving the functionality of its product. Needless to say, the hardware maker did its best to make a system as strong as possible in order to show the limits, or lack thereof, of the Fuzion. As such, the hardware maker decided to use the high processing power of the Intel Core i5 750 central processing unit, which it then paired with 4GB of high-performance memory from OCZ. The CPU cooler used is the Thermaltake SpinQ VT.

Now comes the part that end-users are truly interested in, namely the graphics cards used. Micro-Star International didn't hold back at all and put in some of its finest graphics cards from the Lightning series. The ATI-powered (AMD) graphics card is the R5870 Lightning, which has a GPU clock of 900MHz and 1GB GDDR5 memory at 4800MHz. The NVIDIA-powered card is the N275GTX Lightning, with a GPU clock of 700MHz but a total memory of 1729GB GDDR3 at 2300MHz. When placed together on the Big Bang Fuzion, the large memory of the NVIDIA card combines with the DirectX 11 capabilities of the HD 5000 series card, giving way to a completely new approach to gaming.

No doubt, the company used these two models in order to show the fact that its motherboard could combine even cards with different types of memory (GDDR3 and GDDR5 in this case) and with differing clocks. Unfortunately, there are no benchmark results or any sort of performance numbers available at this time, but the motherboard itself has already been listed on Newegg, where it is priced at $369.99.



Live report by Traian Teglet from CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.