MSI Big Bang XPower II (X79) Motherboard Review

With Intel releasing the X79 and Z77 chipsets quite some time ago now, we’ve seen a small amount of new motherboards hitting the market, therefore not finding many reviews of new boards here. You will however find an influx of top-selling boards that were released at the time of launch, which have made it to market and become big sellers within the community.

One of the brands who are riding this wagon is of course MSI, who are a world reknowned manufacturer of some of the hottest boards around and with Intel dominating the marketplace for processor sales, it would be wrong for us not to look at something that combines both MSI and Intel technology into one.

This is where we see MSI’s top spec X79 board; the Big Bang XPower II come into play with some extreme features and specifications straight out of the box, and the hope that overclocking will rival some of the more known boards in the overclocking world, such as the ROG boards from Asus.

What we will be looking at today is how the board is styled, marketed and of course how it performs with a 3960X X79 processor. With a strong processor and a chipset that is focussed on consumers needing the most amount of power from their system, the Big Bang XPower II X79 motherboard should really be a strong contender, and that’s exactly what we hope to show, with the help of some overclocking functionality too.

Before we jump straight into the figures, we need to show the packaging and accessories that come included with a board of this calibre. After this, we can take a closer look at the board in more detail and then move on to the performance side of things.

Once we have the stock performance pinned, we can move on to see how well this board performs under pressure, by taking a look at its overclocking performance at 4.6GHz in comparison to stock, as well as looking to see how far we can push past this.