 This is another product I've received quite a few requests to unbox. This is the MSI Big Bang X Power and this is part of the refresh of X58 boards that we've seen over the last couple months. So most of the major manufacturers are taking their old X58 designs and they're updating them. So one of the first features that we can talk about with this board is that it has USB 3.0 like many of the newer boards. It also has SATA 6 gigabit per second. So these are two important features that a lot of the motherboard manufacturers have felt is necessary to redesign their boards for. So let's talk about some of the MSI exclusive features. First of all, this is military class. That means they're using only top quality components including Icy Chokes, which are a newer generation ferrite core with up to 20 degree lower temperature, stable power supply and higher power efficiency. They're also using their high conductive polymerized capacitors up to 8 times longer lifetime. And they have a rare highly stable tantalum core. Ooh, self repair ability. Okay, this I was not aware of, but apparently they can repair themselves. It also has solid capacitors. So up to a 10 year lifetime under full load. And then this is kind of interesting. So they've say for gaming up to 12 years and for office up to 40 years. But basically they're saying 10 years, assuming you're running this 24 7 and they will not explode. I think what they mean is leak. So no explosion is guaranteed on this particular motherboard. So let's move a little bit further down. We have EAX Advanced HD support as well as THX certification on this particular audio solution. So it's their Quantum Wave Gaming Audio Card. It's still on board audio, but it is on a riser card. So you will get a little bit less electrical interference if you are using the analog outputs. It supports up to three way SLI as well as three way crossfire. So you can see they've got it demoed here with a three way crossfire configuration. And as I already said before, USB 3.0 and SATA 6 gigabit per second. Let's move around to the back where they're talking about a couple other features. So you've got Dr. Moss 3 in 1 server grade MOSFETs. Here you can look at that. 400% faster than a traditional MOSFET. So that means in terms of the switching speed. And they're saying that one phase of Dr. Moss is more efficient than a four phase traditional MOSFET. Now something that I've actually noticed is there are some other motherboards not made by MSI that have actually switched over on the very high end from other motherboard manufacturers to using a Dr. Moss style MOSFET. They don't call it out as Dr. Moss because that's MSI's marketing name for it, but they have started to make that switch. So here is a quick guide for the Big Bang X Power. It shows us all the features of the board, but we have a real board to look at. So we're not going to bother with that. And let's have a look at the accessory package, which is absolutely huge. I don't even know where to start with this. Okay, well first thing we've got our V-check things. So you can plug these into your motherboard and then you can check voltages using a multimeter. That's a great feature to have on an enthusiast grade board. Next we have their front panel connectors so you can plug all the stuff you need into these and then plug them directly into the board in one chunk. If you have thick fingers and you have trouble with that fine work. We've got a couple SATA 6 gigabit per second ports as well as a Molex to SATA power adapter. We have one very long SLI bridge. And what else do we have? Okay, these two are SLI. So two shorter SLI bridges. And then one crossfire bridge. And that's a long one. Okay, then next we have two SATA 2 3 gigabit per second cables as well as a Molex to SATA power adapter. And then another pack of that. Next we have a backplane adapter. And this I like to see. They've got black SATA cables connected to it. I've seen these in the past included with motherboards, but they're always red. And if you have like a nice color coordinated build, you don't want to use red cables necessarily. We've got two SATA ports as well as a power port. And then they've included a Molex power to two SATA power adapters. So this is as well as one SATA cable. So this is basically for using a bare drives hooked up directly to the back of your PC. Just as like a cheap way to add more storage. Next we've got two USB 2.0 ports on an I.O. plate. We have a motherboard user guide. This is the Europe version. It is English, German, Russian, and French. Okay, shows you how to install your CPU, tells you all about... Oh, this is interesting. We're going to need this for later. I'm really glad I happened to cross that. No, we're going to talk about it later. So we've got a drivers and utilities DVD. Throw it away. We have a quantum wave driver. Throw it away. Download the latest ones. They're hard drive backup utility. We've also got... This is interesting. Ooh, this is for the OC dashboard. Okay, we'll have a closer look at that in a minute as well. So much stuff in here. Quick installation guide. MSI Winky user guide. MSI overclocking guide. Look at that. They include an overclocking guide. No way. So they talk about OC Genie, multi graphics card gaming design. Huh. Well, here they talk a lot more about the technologies that are involved in producing a top overclocking board. That's really cool. I've never seen something like this before. Usually this is the kind of marketing materials you see before you buy it, but they actually want to help you really understand this particular board. Look at this. They've got indicator lights for how many CPU phases are active. Because under low load, it's actually more efficient to have fewer CPU power phases, but under high load, you need more in order to deliver stable power. So they actually dynamically adjust how many phases are running, and then they give you a little indicator to tell you how many. That is very cool. Superpipe. That's another thing I forgot to talk about. Okay, fine. Camera man wants to move on. Okay, then we have the user's guide, which is more in depth, shows you a bunch of the BIOS features. Finally, we have the OC dashboard. Okay, so let's have a look at all the stuff about this. So the OC dashboard panel. So that plugs into your motherboard, and then you have a little USB connector here. So take the OC dashboard through the I.O. shield, connect it to that motherboard port. Okay, what does it do, though? That's what I want to know. Okay, so this gives you BIOS postcodes. So if there's some kind of a problem, this will give you a code on here to tell you what exactly is the problem. It does have an LCD display on it. So you can see that you can adjust a whole bunch of system settings, including things like your CPU voltage. You can adjust your other voltages, DDR voltage. You can adjust... you can use direct OC mode in order to just directly turn up the CPU frequency. So that's something that I can imagine a lot of people using. And last but not least, it also displays some interesting system information, such as CPU temperatures and other things like that. And there's more. There's still more. So including Creative Alchemy as well as the AX 5.0. This is their included onboard sound card. So it has optical as well as coaxial audio out and 7.1 analog audio out. And there's still more. There's still more in here. Look at this. I have never, ever seen an accessory package this complete with anything, never mind the motherboard. So here's the USB cable for the OC dashboard, and here is the other cable for the OC dashboard. So that's the one that plugs in right through the back of the I.O. shield, which finally we have arrived at. How long... I wonder how long this unboxing is already. It took me like five minutes just to get through the accessories. Okay, let's have a look at the motherboard itself, finally. So this is a premium X58 board. That means you're going to find all of the bells and whistles. So the super pipe here, that's an 8mm heat pipe that goes all the way around from all of the MOSFET coolers and then down to the north bridge, you're going to find an LGA 1366 socket. This is a Lotz socket, so you don't have to worry about any of that scare stuff that was going around with poor contact between the CPU and the pins inside. We've got not one, but two 8-pin power connectors up in their ideal location on the top left of the board. Okay, you can plug in two 4-pins by the look of things, but I really would recommend with a board like this, either a single 8-pin or if you have two, plug in both. We've got the easy installation RAM slots. So you can see that there are clips only on the one side. So you basically just slide the module in and clip it from the one side and you're done. In theory, that saves a little work, but I think it's more to do with the fact that the clips here can sometimes bump up against the back of a graphics card installed in the top PCIe slot. So that really conveniences you that way. Okay, I don't think convenience is you is actually a valid thing to say, but here we go. 16 phases of CPU power with indicator LEDs up here showing you how many are actually active at any given time. These memory slots do support triple channel memory. So you're going to want to populate the black ones first and then the blue ones as per all X58 boards out there on the market. Cameraman's wandering around. He's looking at the south bridge, but I want to show you the 24 pin power connectors in its ideal location on the right hand edge of the board. And then we've got a nice big south bridge heatsink here. And I think the reason that they put such a big cooler because the south bridge doesn't need a lot of cooling is because you can install so many graphics cards in this motherboard. So if you've got this all filled up, you're going to need a fair bit of cooling down here in order to keep that at a safe operating temperature because graphics cards do kick out a lot of heat. Down here we've got six SATA two, three gigabit per second ports as well as two SATA three, six gigabit per second ports. We've got our V checkpoints for a CPU QPI, DDR, IOH, ICH and a ground connection. Next, we've got a couple of V switches. So these are actually hardware voltage switches, I believe. And then we've got a couple of front USB headers. This is a feature I love. These are touch sensitive buttons. So you've got power reset, OC Genie, as well as the direct front side bus or rather I should say base clock adjustment buttons here. You've got front firewire. And then this is a pretty killer feature of this board. You've got six PCI Express 16x slots, but there is a bit of a catch. So here in the manual I found the page that tells you how to install your graphics cards. Now, they will not all run at PCI Express 16x at the same time. So make sure you follow these guides in order to get the fastest speed possible. Because if you populate one card, you're getting 16x. Two cards, 16x. If you populate three cards, you're getting 16, 16, 8. If you do four cards, you're getting 8, 8, 8. If you do five cards, I believe one of them scales down to 4x. And if you're doing six cards, I believe two of them scale down to 4x. Although I could be mistaken about the exact particulars. Yeah, here we go. So if you have six expansion cards, you're running at 8, 4, 4, 8, 4, 4. Okay, so there I was actually mistaken. Quite a few of them will scale down to 4x. Now, it should be noted that 8x is not going to impact performance in anything but a synthetic benchmark. So you can do up to four cards at 8x. And then 4x actually for most cards on the market will not have a negative performance impact. If you are installing six graphics cards, make sure you do plug into the supplemental PCI Express 6-pin power connector here. That's to make sure that your graphics cards do get enough power. Because none of these other ports are going to be able to provide enough power through the motherboard for that many video cards. Last but not least, we're moving around to the back of the board where we've got two PS2 ports. Very happy to see that. We have a CMOS clear port. We have their OC tool plug-in here. Then we have Firewire, six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, two gigabit Ethernet ports, and two USB 3.0 ports. Thank you for checking out my long, long unboxing of the MSI Big Bang XPower motherboard.