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MSI's Big Bang Conqueror renamed 990FXA-GD80
If the increase of leaks of upcoming motherboards is an indicator of something, then it would be that we’re very close to Computex and with just over a week to go, MSI’s upcoming 990FXA-GD80 has made an appearance alongside a pretty comprehensive spec sheet. MSI showed off a board called the Big Bang Conqueror 990FX board back at CES, but it appears that this is actually the 990FXA-GD80 now, which makes us wonder if MSI has something even more extreme in its line-up, or if the company has killed off the Big Bang brand.
It’s surprising how little has changed in the six months since CES, although it’s a little bit hard to see if MSI has made any real changes to the PCB from the pictures that leaked alongside the specifications. This is of course and AMD 990FX board with the SB950 and the board has a 8+2 PWM design good for 140W CPUs. MSI claims support for DDR3 memory up to 2133MHz, although not officially of course.
The slot layout consists of four x16 PCI Express slots, of which the second and fourth slots are only used in four x8 mode, although due to the board layout it’s not possible to use more than three dual slot cards at once. There are also two x1 PCI Express slots and a single PCI slot. MSI hasn’t added any additional SATA ports, so the standard six SATA 6Gbps ports is what you have to make to with. The board also has a nifty angled front mounted USB 3.0 pin header as well as at least two pin headers for an additional four USB 2.0 ports and one pin header for a FireWire port.
Around the back we have a pair of PS/2 ports (really MSI?), four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATAp ports (combo USB/eSATA), a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out and a clear CMOS button. Overall this is a decent enough board, but for a flagship product it feels like MSI hasn’t quite gone all the way, especially not compared to what we’ve already seen that Asus has coming.