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MSI's newest high-end LGA1366 motherboard comes at a time when there are new offerings by several motherboard makers boasting of support for USB 3.0, SATA 6 Gb/s, and support for the Core i7 "Gulftown" six-core processors out of the box. Another feature is having more than four PCI-Express x16 slots, which is becoming a trend. The lure here is being able to run four graphics cards in multi-GPU, with enough expansion room left for a fifth graphics card for processing physics, and that ATI and NVIDIA have multi-head display technologies in the making. First pictured in late January, the XPower X58 is MSI's socket LGA1366 platform addition to the Big Bang series of high-end products. The production version has a cooling system which uses heatsinks over the CPU VRM areas and X58 chipset, which are connected by a thick 8 mm heatpipe which MSI refers to as "SuperPipe". The ICH10R southbridge is cooled by an independent, slightly larger heatsink.

On offer are six PCI-Express x16 slots, a strong CPU VRM driven by a 16-phase PWM circuit which draws power from two 8-pin power connectors and uses DrMOS chips and High-C capacitors, a 3-phase memory power circuit, overclocker-friendly features such as consolidated voltage measure points, OC Genie, OC Dashboard module, a voltage-measure kit called V-kit, and Easy OC DIP switch. While the ICH10R gives out six SATA 3 Gb/s ports, an additional controller gives two 6 Gb/s ports (colour-coded white). Audio is care of a bundled PCI-Express x1 audio card called the MSI QuantumWave that includes THX TruStudio PC Suite, and support for Creative EAX 5.0 HD. Connectivity includes dual gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports next to a number of USB 2.0 ports, power-eSATA, FireWire, and a connector for the OC Dashboard module. The MSI XPower X58 should be released soon.



Source: Bit-Tech.net

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