MSI Big Bang XPower Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Intel X58 chipset is two-chip solution and the motherboard manufacturer can chose between ICH10 and ICH10R south bridge chip, and the only difference between them is the support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 on t
he latter (which is the model used on this motherboard). The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports, no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable and embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control).

Big Bang XPower provides all the six SATA-300 ports with support for Intel Matrix Storage (i.e., RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10). These ports are black. Two SATA-600 ports (the white ones) are available, controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip. These two ports support RAID 0 and 1. And two eSATA-300 ports are available on the rear panel controlled by a JMicron JMB362 chip (one of them is shared with a USB 2.0 port).

The internal SATA ports are installed on the motherboard edge and rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them.

This motherboard comes with an I/O bracket with two eSATA ports, allowing you to convert up to two internal SATA ports into eSATA.

Figure 4: Internal SATA ports.

No ATA-133 nor floppy disk drive controller is present.

From the 12 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, MSI Big Bang XPower offer 10 of them, six soldered on the rear panel and four available through two motherboard headers. The motherboard comes with an I/O bracket containing two USB ports.

One of the highlights of this motherboard is the presence of two USB 3.0 ports, controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip. These ports are available on the rear panel of the product and painted blue (USB 2.0 ports are black).

Additionally MSI Big Bang XPower comes with a FireWire (IEEE 1394) controller (VIA VT6315N), providing two FireWire ports, one standard-sized soldered on the rear panel and one available through a header. The motherboard doesn’t come with an I/O bracket for you to use the second FireWire port.

Audio is generated by an add-on PCI Express x1 card, based on a Realtek ALC889 codec, which provides professional-grade audio to this motherboard, with eight channels, 24-bit resolution, sampling rate of up to 192 kHz for both inputs and outputs, 104 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs and 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs. With a high signal-to-noise ratio like this you can work professionally converting, mixing and editing audio from an analog source (e.g., converting VHS tapes and vinyl records to the digital format) with no background noise (white noise).

This card uses gold-plated jacks and has both optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs. It also has a small two-pin SPDIF output in case you want to route digital audio to one of your video cards in order to have digital audio available on the HDMI output. It provides independent analog outputs, meaning that you don’t need to “kill” the mic in or the line in jack if you install an analog 7.1 speaker set.

Figure 5: Sound card.

The sound card uses only solid capacitors. Way to go.

Figure 6: Sound card.