MSI has come up with its own way of configuring the 32 PCI Express lanes from the X58 chipset, as the board will normally only have two working x16 slots. You can also run with one slot in x16 mode and two slots in x8 mode, or four slots in x8 mode. However, if you want to use all six slots you end up with two slots in x8 mode and four slots in x4 mode which limits the usefulness of having so many slots, at least for anyone that intends to slot in graphics cards in all six slots. Oh, yes, there’s also an x1 PCI Express slot at the top of the board as well, but this is taken up by the supplied Quantum Wave sound card, which offers EAX 5.0 support and THX TruStudio PRO certification.

 

However, this is just the tip of the feature iceberg, as MSI has really gone overboard here to cater for the enthusiast users. MSI has improved on its PWM design by adding Hi-C caps - or highly-conductive polymerized capacitors, if you want the full name - although we’ve seen these on a few other boards from MSI already and they are in fact tantalum capacitors. Add to this MSI’s new “Icy Choke”, which offers a claimed 20 degrees C reduction in operating temperature and of course MSI’s DrMOS MOSFETs. In addition, MSI also has its own version of dynamic phase usage called APS that will throttle the number of power phases used when the system is idling.There are no less than two 8-pin 12V power connectors, as well as an additional 6-pin 12V connector, on the board, all of which are supposed to help with overclocking it. Please do note that half of this extra gear is only likely to be of any use for extreme overclockers that use liquid nitrogen and not your average overclocker at home, who might have a watercooling setup at the most. There is of course a block of metering points for a multi-meter on the board as well, just as with MSI’s past high-end models

   

Article Source: http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/04/30/msi-launches-big-bang-xpower/