MSI Big Bang Marshal Motherboard Review

During our initial Sandy Bridge motherboard roundup, the MSI P67A-GD65 (as well as the P67A-GD55) motherboards stood out as great performers, especially considering their price. While they may not have been as fully featured as the other high-end Gigabyte or ASUS motherboard, the MSI boards still held their ground for providing great performance. Now though, it’s time to see MSI’s flagship LGA1155 motherboard on which they have lavished pretty much every imaginable feature in the form of the Big Bang Marshal.

Let’s go down the features list right from the top. First of all the Big Bang Marshal has a 24 power phases all of which are DrMOS VRMs. This coupled with their Military Class II Hi-C caps and SFCs will ensure ample power delivery during extreme overclocking sessions. The OC Genie II helps those who don’t want to venture in too deep, with an ample 4.2GHz overclock on our Core i7-2600K CPU.

Before I move onto anything else, the first thing everybody must have noticed from the pictures are the 8x PCIe x16 slots. Of course, since there are 8 PCIe slots, each of these will get 4 lanes, thanks to the Lucid Hydra 200 chip. Keep in mind that since most modern day cards (mid-range onwards) are dual slot solutions, so realistically nobody will have more than 4 cards at one time, thus giving 8 lanes for each of the 4 utilized slots.