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The XPower Big Bang is an ATX motherboard with an all-black PCB. The upper right hand corner of the board has two 8-pin power connectors, which provide more stable power to the board when overclocking. If you’re not doing serious overclocking a single 8-pin power connector will suffice. The cooling starts off with a heatpipe with the BIG BANG logo on top of it.
The heatpipe leads to a heatsink that covers the DrMOS MOSFETs that MSI uses on their boards. A DrMOS logo is atop that heatsink. A second heatpipe leads out to the X58 Northbridge. MSI calls this solution their SuperPipe solution, keeping the DrMOS chips and the X58 up to 20C cooler than with a traditional solution. There is another heatsink covering the ICH10R Southbridge.
The CPU area is free of obstacles, allowing a large after-market cooling solution to be installed on the motherboard. MSI really went all out with the board in terms of capacitors using the Hi-C capacitors instead of the electrolyte capacitors used in other motherboards. Hi-c Capacitors run cooler and deliver better power efficiency to the components.
The board has six DIMM slots under the CPU Socket. These take up to 24GB of DDR3 memory clocked up to 2000MHz. Note that the 2000MHz clock is achieved through overclocking as the LGA-1366 Core i7 CPUs only support up to 1066MHz memory natively in triple channel mode, but using XMP memory profiles you can get higher.
The bottom right side of the board starts off with the FP connectors. The bottom of the board starts off with some solid capacitors and the 24-pin power connector. The board has a large heatsink over the Southbridge chip. Six SATA ports are to the left of the 24-pin connector that are 2.0 certified meaning 3 Gb/second and are colored black. Two white SATA ports are the next item, which are the 6 Gb/second ports on the board controlled by a Marvell controller.
The next item on the board is the V-check points. MSI has decided to offer the ability to check the voltage of the motherboard components with a multi-tester with checkpoints they call V-Check points. A Voltage switch is next allowing for extreme voltage when all the switches are flipped. The next item is a POST LED followed by two USB headers.
The next area of the board is interesting in that an OC Genie button is present. Placeholders are in place for onboard Power and Reset buttons. The other side of the OC Genie button has + and – spots reserved for raising and lowering the overclock of the board. Two fan headers and a Firewire header round out the left side of the board.
Expansion on this board consists of six PCI Express 2.0 x16 expansion slots. The 1st and 2nd slots support up to x16 speed, PCIE 5 and 7 supports up to x8 speed and PCIE 4 and 6 supports up to x4 speed. The x58 chipset has 36 PCI Express lanes at one time so if four video cards are installed, they are at x8 speed each, two at x16. The motherboard supports either AMD’s Crossfire technology or NVIDIA’s SLI technology, with up to four cards installed on the board.
The Rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 mouse and Keyboard port, a Clear CMOS button, the connect for the OC Dashboard accessory, five USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports colored blue, an ESATA port, a ESATA/USB 2.0 Combo port, a Firewire port and 2 LAN ports. You’ll notice the lack of audio jacks, as those are found on the audio card included as part of the bundle. The inclusion of two LAN ports is also interesting.
