MSI Big Bang Z77 Mpower review -
Product Showcase
If we zoom in a little but more then we got stuff sticking out ... in blue to your left is Bluetooth and to thy right is embedded WIFI.
For WIFI you can connect an antenna or antenna + extender. 802.11 b/g/n is supported covering a fairly wide scope of bandwidth versus WIFI frequencies.
The motherboard is just gorgeous to look at really. The Z77 MPower has an improved 16-phase VRM, the motherboard can actually draw power from a 6-pin PCIe power connector close by the regular 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS. The board comes with diagnostic LEDs and voltage measurement points. Familiar will be the three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (x8/x4/x4-capable slots and four PCI-Express 2.0 x1. Of course MSI applied their Military Class III components on the motherboard and you'll spot OC Genie II which increases your overall CPU, Memory performance.
These boards come OC Certified, OC Certified is MSIs overclocking testing procedure where MSI's Z77 MPOWER mainboard is tested for stability with a 24-hour Prime95 stress test. OC Certified tests a mainboard in three key areas:
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OC Performance
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Stable Power
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PWM Cooling
All OC Certified tests are run at a minimum of 4.6 GHz CPU speed, this simulates the high-end overclock range of todays 3rd Generation Intel Core CPUs. Stable Power is tested by running Prime95 for 24-hours in low airflow conditions. This ensures that the PWM is capable of supplying stable power to the CPU under extreme conditions. The PWM cooling is stressed in low-airflow conditions combined with high overclocks
The board has one 8-pin power header for the processor located on just behind he rear IO panel. The board is loaded with hidden little extra's by the way. We'll show you them all in this review of course. The Z77 MPOWER is built with these Military Class III components that entails DrMOS II - Hi-c CAP - SFC (Super Ferrite Choke) and usage of Solid capacitors.
Today we test the Z77 MPower version, which as you'll notice is a pleasant upgrade from their Z77A-GD65 motherboard -- yet with an improved CPU VRM, more friendly warranties and a new black and yellow color-scheme which merges the Lightning series graphics cards and these motherboards a little closer together. Have a peek at what was just released, this is the MSI Big Bang Z77 MPower motherboard. You just have to be impressed by the overall looks ...
MSI Big Bang P67 Marshal review
Powered by Intel's P67 chipset, the MSI Big Bang Marhal comes with MSI's latest Military Class II design that makes use of a 24 phase (!) power SFC choke setup alongside the best quality Hi-c CAP's and Japanese made solid capacitors. Added to the mix for additional PCIe lanes is a Hydra chip, which also can be utilized to combine mix and match graphics cards in a multi-GPU setup. The board comes with 24-phase DrMOS power design, voltage monitoring points, an external overclock device called the OC dashboard, that all new EFI BIOS, dual-BIOS selectable with a simple button, and OC genie button that allows you to have say a 2500K processor run at 4200 with the flick of a switch. I'm not done though, we spot integrated audio with SoundBlaster X-Fi application (software) layer, ten SATA ports of which four are based on the all new SATA 6G. Thick heatpipe (passive and thus silent) cooling and more and more. This board is a true hardware enthusiast dream come true, or is it ?
MSI Big Bang X58 XPower review
We test and review the XPower from MSI. Last month Intel added a new processor in the line-up, the ever so strong Core i7 980 Extreme six-core processor. Seriously breathtaking, and to date the fastest consumer processor on the globe with very decent overclock potential as well. That was reason enough for most ODM to make new updates and revisions of the X58 chipset based motherboards, as next top the new processor we also have seen the gradual adoption of features like USB 3.0 and SATA3 6G. MSI is on of the ODMs releasing something really special, today we'll review the Big Bang X58 XPower motherboard. It is chucked full with the latest gadgets and features, it is equipped to make sure you get the very best overclock out of it and heck, even if you can't overclock, flick a button and the motherboard will do the work for you, completely automated.
MSI Big bang Fuzion (Lucid Hydra) review
MSI has yet another motherboard lined up in the P55 motherboard Big Bang series, ready and waiting for you. It's called the 'Fuzion' and comes with that much discussed Lucid Hydra 200 chip. Now the big deal about the Big Bang mainboard is that the board has that Lucid Hydra 200 chip that allows it to support multiple video cards of different brands and models at once. This in theory would allow you get the extra performance from your old video card and your new card even if one is NVIDIA and the other is ATI. The Hydra 200 is a real-time distributed processing engine that acts as an intelligent graphics load balancer.