MSI shows off its Big Bang Marshal board

Whoah! This board looks good!

What do you do as a motherboard manufacturer when you have to come up with a flagship product that is unlike anything your competitors have? Well, in the case of MSI you create the Big Bang Marshal, a monster of a board that features no less than eight x16 PCI Express slots in an XL-ATX form factor.

The first and most obvious question is how MSI managed to get enough bandwidth for eight x16 PCI Express slots and the simple answer is, they didn't. The more complex answer is that the board has four slots with x16 bandwidth and if you want to use all eight slots, they operate at x8 bandwidth. This is still way more bandwidth than the Sandy Bridge processors offer and MSI didn't use a pair of nF200 chips either, instead the Big Bang Marshal uses a new Lucid Hydra chip that we sadly don't have any specific details on at this moment, but from what we understood, this time around we're talking about a bridge chip rather than a solution that allows for mix and match graphics cards to work in tandem.

It's not hard to see that MSI has tried its best to create something out of the ordinary with the Big Bang Marshal and so far it's one of the most impressive P67 boards we've seen in terms of features. One thing that caught our attention was four dip switches at the front of the board which are labelled PCI-E CeaseFire. Each switch corresponds to one of the four x16 PCI Express slots and allows the slots to be manually switched off. This is meant to be a feature that some overclockers have requested for when they're using multiple graphics cards in a board. As for the blue block of four dip switches, it's referred to as a V-switch and has something to do with Voltage adjustments.