MSI Big Bang XPower II (X79) Motherboard Review

We’ve seen some good things from our trusty 3960X, especially with the higher-end boards which are focussed on overclocking features and sheer speed and performance. With that in mind, we were expecting good things from the MSI Big Bang XPower II as this is MSI’s attempt at pushing the conjoining hardware to the limits, and in this case; our CPU.

We can now honestly say that the MSI Big Bang XPower II showed to us that it really does mean business and managed to get us all the way up to 5GHz using the 50x multiplier and a stock bus speed of 100MHz. While we did need to crank the voltage up to around 1.575V and include a bit of vDroop to bring it closer to the 1.55V mark, we had sufficient cooling from our Corsair H80 and temperatures remained fairly consistent throughout our stability tests.

We did try to push things further by increasing the multiplier to 51x but this was certainly not going to happen and wouldn’t even allow us to boot into Windows, so the other general tactic is to drop the multiplier and to increase the base clock, but this showed similar results with a boot loop on the Windows loading screen. After tweaking the voltages further, we did manage to get above 5GHz slightly but upon stress testing, the system greeted us with a BSOD and we knew that we had met our limit.

After settling on 5GHz, we continued to stress test using a variety of programs such as Cinebench, Super PI and 3DMark 11 to which we found temperatures were stable and the system purred along without a single issue.