As Intel's X58 chipset may be becoming a little long in the tooth - after all it's been around for a couple of years the initial motherboards that used it are still capable boards but they have been passed by boards maintained with latest technologies such as SATA 6 and USB 3.0.

MSI has known this and gone back to the drawing board before unleashing the Big Bang XPower a wide sounding name for a mightily attractive motherboard. SATA 6 and USB 3.0 are only two parts of an impressive looking list covering some very great hardware on the power supply side.

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The first thing that comes to your attention when viewing at the board is the plainly the number of PCI-E graphics slots six. Yes that's correct six but you require to take care when using them to get the good out of them. If you are just calculative a standard dual-card CrossFire or SLI setup then you use the first block and the fourth bllock as these work at full x16 speed all the time. The others work at x8 all the time and x4 speed . The board supports both Quad SLI and Quad CrossfireX.

Because of the many of PCI-E designer block there's only sufficient room on the board for one more block which is an x1 PCI-E slot. This sits above the first X16 slot and MSI even gives something to fill it in the figure of a QuantumWave sound card dealing with Realtek's ALC889 codec and supporting EAX 5.0 and THX TruStudio Pro this card has solid capacitors.

At the heart of the board is an Intel 1366 Socket that helps all of Intel's Core i7 processors with the mighty six-cored i7 980X. The six DIMM slots can holdup to a more of of 24GB of DDR3 memory but keep in mind that the chipset uses triple channel memory architecture so to get the better out of it you have to use either three or all six slots. The Big Bang XPower allows memory speeds up to 2133MHz through overclocking.