MSI Big Bang X58 XPower review

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MSI Big Bang X58 XPower

Recently MSI introduced their new V-Kit concept allowing Voltage monitoring and manipulation.. It was already to be found at some of their their Lightning series graphics cards, but it is extended towards the high-end motherboards as well. MSI creates voltage measuring points for various voltages used by the motherboards.

All the way to the left you can also see DIP-switches, with the dip-switch next to the Voltage control points, you can actually increase the voltage at hardware level breaking the BIOS limits with another 0.2 Volts.

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Voltage monitoring -- Here's the idea, you stick a wire onto a positive and ground pin and that allows you to check out voltages with a multimeter.

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Above you can see how that works, we are tapping the (at this point) non overclocked CPU rails here by the way.

MSI Big Bang X58 XPower

Overall board design is just great. Everything is positioned really well. Let's move onward to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors. Here we see one downside, the two 6G ports are pointing upwards, potentially blocking one PCIe graphic card, but MSI literally did not have space left on this board. We doubt you'll be using all 6 PCIe ports though.

The Big Bang XPower features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10. In addition to the regular six SATA II ports, colored in white we see another two additional SATA 3 (6 GBit) ports, powered by a Marvel controller. They support RAID 0/1 and JBOD to achieve RAID - select AHCI in the BIOS then during boot access the Marvel controller where you can set RAID levels).

Then another JMicron controller brings the support for two eSATA/USB combo port on the I/O panel.

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