During the last week we have seen many new P55 based motherboards,  among them the new line of ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI. But check this out from MSI. It is a somewhat hidden product within the MSI product line - It is called the Big Bang,  which is a P55 motherboard with Lucid Hydra chip - which should enable multi-gpu operation of both NVIDIA and ATI based video cards on the same motherboard. 

Here at Guru3D.com we still, say .. why the heck would you want to do that anyways ? As you pay more for the Lucid chip instead of just paying for two similar cards.

Lucid is an israeli company, located at Kfar-Neter, which is developing the Hydra Chip, which is a Chip that should enable the use of NVIDIA and ATI  video cards on the same motherboard.the company holds some cooperation agreements with some of the biggest players in hardware industry, and the motherboard that we preview today is one of the first products of this  cooperations.

The Lucid Hydra chip, as mentioned before should enable the use of 2  different video cards together on the same motherboard. We have been told in the past that there will be different versions of the chip - one will enable the usage of video cards like HD4870 along with a HD4650 for example , another version will enable the usage of NVIDIA based video cards together - like a GTX260 together with 9600GT for example,  and of course one version will enable a mix of video cards -ATI video card  together with a Nvidia video card on the same motherboard. The Hydra chip is responsible for the Balance and link between the different video cards.

MSI P55 "The Big Bang" is a P55 based motherboard, the Hydra Chip is located between the CPU socket and the first/Upper PCI-Express Slot. As for now we can't tell which one of the versions of the Hydra is placed on the motherboard, and how it performs -- via iopanel.net

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