MSI’s Big Bang Marshal motherboard nearly ready for launch

Intel’s SATA issue most likely holding it back

THE INSANELY FEATURE packed Big Bang Marshal motherboard from MSI is nearly ready, at least judging by pictures of what should be the final revision of the board that we got our hands on. However, thanks to Intel’s SATA snafu we’re fairly certain that MSI will sit on this model until it can get its hands on the B3 stepping of the P67 chipset to avoid any returns of what is likely going to be a very expensive motherboard.

The board has reached revision 1.1 which suggests is ready for prime time and it looks like MSI has only done some minor tweaks to the board compared to our last encounter with it back in late December. The audio part has been covered with a small metal shield which carries an X-Fi MB2 sticker, but this board doesn’t actually have hardware X-Fi audio, instead it’s a software solution. MSI has also added EuP 2013 certification, but these are really the only changes we could spot apart from an additional label on one of the heatsink and slightly larger text where the motherboard name is printed.

We’re not sure how much of a market there is for this crazy high-end P67 motherboard from MSI, especially as the Z68 chipset is expected to launch within the next two to three months. That said, the Big Bang Marshal is still a fairly unique product by virtue of being the only LGA-1155 board to date with eight x16 PCI Express slots, but the question is if it’ll be enough for MSI to steal any market share from its competitors, something the company sorely needs.S|A

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