Review: MSI Big Bang Xpower II X79
Published by Marc Büchel on 14.02.12Fazit
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| Holding the MSI Big Bang XPower II in your hands for the first time, gave us quite a strange feeling. Despite the fact that we have to motherboards every day, the XL-ATX formfactor is strangely huge. Already eATX is big, but this is massive. A Rampage IV Extreme almost looks small next to the Big Bang Xpower II. Therefore you can expect that there is plenty of space to install a lot of hardware and there are no components colliding with eachother. Generally we also liked the design, except the weaponry coolers. We would really like to do MSI make two versions of this board. One with the weapon coolers and another with nicely shaped standard coolers. We also liked the fact that this board offers a total of seven full size PCI Express slots. Therefore you can have Quad SLI as well as Quad CrossFireX setups running on this motherboard. And sure there are four slots that already offer support for PCI Express 3.0. | - Design - 7 x Full-Size-PCI-Express - Quad SLI Support |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Generally the MSI Big Bang Xpower II's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There even is a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. The reason that there are seven full size PCI Express slots makes it inevitable that in a quad SLI setup you'll have to place one card in the last slot available. This means, that if you have a dual slot card, the connectors as well as the power and reset buttons will be covered by the graphics card. The XL-ATX formfactor this board ships with, offers as many advantages as it offers disadvantages. The space for hardware to install this board offers comes at the cost of compatibilty concerning cases. |
- Angled SATA connectors - Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Spac around the CPU socket - Placement of the power design |
- XL-ATX | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| In our overall rankings the Big Bang Xpower II was able to convince regarding 3D performance. In this case it did well in Futuremark 3DMark Vantage as well as 3DMark 11. Concerning the 2D benchmarks the results produced by this board are disappointing. The Big Bang Xpower II comes in second to last and only the Intel reference board was slower on average. Especially in SuperPi, Wprim and SiSoft Sandra the board simply can't keep up with the competition. | - 3DMark Vantage - 3DMark 11 |
- SiSoft Sandra - SuperPi - Wprime |
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| Power Consumption | + | - | |
| When it comes to power consumption this board did really well. It seems like the power saving features make a good job. At this point we have to mention for that the Big Bang Xpower II can automatically disable different power phases which are not needed when the CPU is in idle for example. In the end the result is a third place behind an mATX motherboard, which is quite astonishing for such a huge thing. | - Idle Power | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| You might either love or hate the design of this board which means that it surely wont be everybodies darling. Something else concerns the 2D performance: in this case we just hope that future BIOS update help increasing the numbers. If you also take the price of CHF 429.- (est. EUR 358.-) into account such a performance deviation compared to other boards simply shouldn't happen. | -
Enthusiasts - Gaming System |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the MSI Big Bang Xpower II gets sufficient three out of five stars. | |||
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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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