New MSI Motherboard Packs Eight x16 PCI Express Slots

From DailyTech: Gaming-geared hardware maker MSI's new P67 board, designed to work with Intel's new LGA1155 Sandy Bridge CPUs, will compete with Intel's first-party board designs. If you have the money, MSI Big Bang Marshal, revealed by Semiaccurate, hands you some serious firepower for your buck.

The board's eight slots may leave you blinking -- no those aren't slots for RAM DIMs, they're 8 full-size x16 PCI Express slots. Four of the slots operate at x16, while four are truly operating at the bandwidth of a typical x8 slot. Still, that's way more bandwidth than Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset or a single nForce 200 chipset could handle. Instead, the board leverages the top secret upcoming Lucid Hydra chip. Unlike previously previewed Hydra chips, this is an actual bridge chip, so you probably can't mix and match GPUs, unfortunately.

The four true x16 PCI Express lanes are each wired to a DIP switch in a blue bank that allows you to quickly turn off a lane. The featured, dubbed PCI-E CeaseFire, is much request by overclockers, who could use it to turn off undesired lanes, or to turn off a lane that was becoming unstable.

The board has four DDR3 DIMM slots and will likely support up to 32 GB of RAM.

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