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MSI Big Bang XPOWER Intel X58 motherboard review
V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.
Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.
Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.
Major new features:
- Slate: A node based material editor.
- Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
- Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
- 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
- Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
- Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
- Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
- Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
- Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
- FBX file linking
- Save to Previous Release (2010)
We render a KitGuru custom created scene at 1920×1200 and record the time taken, lower is better.
As before there are slight gains to be had when moving to the MSI board, with 2 seconds being shaved off the overall time. This would translate to more over a long period of time, and we could see many minutes being saved over the course of a day.
bugger me with a bargepole, thats bloody impressive.
MSi really are pulling out all the stops recently to get seen in high end circles. I think its working !
Looks like a mega product again from MSI. price is high but I expected that after reading the review.
Love the design, they look to have covered everything from design to connectivity. the OC genie is a great idea and I was surprised to hear it worked well, thats a bit of a shocker.
Very good review Zardon, thank you.
That bundle is crazy good, so much in it, no wonder it costs so much. Seems a good price I think its cheaper than the asus rampage board just released.
Seems to be low stock levels of this everywhere, must be popular or a low build rate for MSI.
hard to get in some parts of the world, so ive heard, yah.
They need to realise a board like this for the 1156 platform also. that platform has such crappy boards throughout the ranges.
Good review and I was interested to see the power drain was lower than competiting products. thats always a good sign.
MSI are underrated in the motherboard market, but I love to see them creating these products to go head to head with ASUS and the top level players on the market right now. This looks to be better than the Ramage from what ive seen on kitguru and other review sites.
Its a really good looking board, I hate all the ordinary capacitors we normally see around the CPU socket, but those HIc capacitors are a huge selling point, for me anyway.
I think AMD motherboards are better equipped, but this one really helps Intel 1366 buyers. so much on it and a great variety of high quality components onboard.
I currently own a gigabyte board which i love, but I want to move to 1366, I think this would be top of my list, its well priced considering the quality throughout.
Its impresive, but I feel ASUS still have the quality edge. the rampage board is the cream of the crop.
@ Derek, normally I would agree, but I cant see there being any better 1366 motherboard on the market right now. MSI are really doing their homework before releasing these products.
excellent, really excellent. way out of my price range, but I can dream
MSI rock, they really do, I loved the review of the R5870 card on kitguru last month. all their changes arent just for show or talk,. they really make a difference
Very good product, the price isnt as bad as I thought, I had surmissed it would be £320.
No real weaknesses indeed. even the sata ports are in the right places. so many makers (yes im looking at you intel), put sata ports right under a long graphics card which is useless, even with a 90 degree designed connector.