Come January, and the replacement for Socket 1156, Sandy Bridge will arrive and probably hit the hardware with some slight storm. At least that’s what Intel’s hoping. Tagging along the launch of Sandy Bridge will be hardware partners, where motherboard manufacturers will start selling boards for the Sandy Bridge. Among those hundreds of boards will be one called the “Big Bang”.

That’s right, the name that’s associated with MSI’s top notch high-end motherboard. And this time they’re really going all out with a bang. The motherboard obviously supports Sandy Bridge, and offers support for dual-channel DDR3 memory up to 2GHz. But the most important thing here is that this motherboard, which is code-named Marshall, will be using the Hydra technology. What’s that? Well, full 8 PCI-Express x16 slots. That’s right; it’ll support your Quad-SLI dream system very well.

The board itself is quite huge in person, and looks very muscular. The photos that we have right now are samples, as they’re still nekkid with no heatsinks yet. The board itself is very much overclock oriented obviously as it’s targeted at the enthusiast market. There’s the MSI OC Genie one-touch which helps ease overclocking. The boards’ lower right shows some reset and CMOS clear buttons. USB 3.0 ports are made possible thanks to the NEC controller. However, initial report stated that there’s no support for SATA 6Gbps. The board will arrive in January, so we’ll see how the final product is by then.

SOURCE via donanimhaber.com