There are a number of different approaches to take when designing a headline-grabbing flagship motherboard, but it looks like MSI has gone for complete overkill with its new top-of-the-line Sandy Bridge mobo - the Big Bang Marshal.
SemiAccurate had the chance to get an early look at the board ahead of the official Sandy Bridge launch next week. Obviously the P67 chipset will support Intel's upcoming next-gen CPUs, but the Marshal has much more going for it than just compatibility with the new processors.
By opting for an XL-ATX form-factor, MSI has managed to squeeze eight PCIe x16 slots onto the board which can be run in either a four x16 or an eight x8 configuration. All of this is made possible by Lucid's HydraLogix chip, which should also enable any combination of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards to be used in multi-GPU harmony.
But the overkill doesn't end there. The board comes with three separate BIOS chips, a full complement of eight USB 3.0 ports, two eight-pin P4 power connectors and a six-pin connector to feed extra juice directly into the PCIe slots. There's also the normal array of enthusiast features including SATA 6Gbps, dual gigabit Ethernet, on-board power, reset and overclocking buttons, an LED error display and voltage measurement points. Of course, topping all of this off are some serious looking heatsinks to keep the power circuitry cool.
Apparently the Big Bang Marshal is still in development, so the feature set could change a little before it launches in the middle of Q1 2011. However, the design is likely to be fairly final, meaning that we could be seeing this beast of a board arriving in the near future, and are almost guaranteed to get a better look at CES next week.
In related news, MSI has announced that it will also be showing the fruits of a partnership with BigFoot Networks that will see Killer NICs integrated into some of the next-generation of Big Bang motherboards. Again, more details will be revealed in Las Vegas.
