Introduction

Aaah this is a review that has been a long time coming for sure. Uber high-end P55 MSI motherboards, first there was the MSI P55 GD80. A top notch, P55 motherboard from MSI. Then MSI upped the ante a little, and expanded and transformed their P55 GD80 design towards the Big Bang series. The first product released in the Big Bang series was the 'Trinergy'. The motherboard is an advanced P55 motherboard based off that GD80 -- yet now with more features and an NF200 bridge chip to bring along some more much needed PCIe bandwidth for multi-GPU solutions.

But MSI had yet another motherboard lined up in the Big Bang series ready and waiting for you. It's called the 'Fuzion' and comes with that much discussed Lucid Hydra 200 chip.

Now the big deal about the Big Bang mainboard is that the board has that Lucid Hydra 200 chip that allows it to support multiple video cards of different brands and models at once. This in theory would allow you to get the extra performance from your old video card and your new card even if one is NVIDIA and the other is ATI. The Hydra 200 is a real-time distributed processing engine that acts as an intelligent graphics load balancer.

• MSI Big Bang Fuzion = with the Lucid Hydra chip (allows mixing graphics cards) this motherboard has been delayed to Q1 2010.
• MSI Big Bang Trinergy = with NVIDIA NF200 chip (adds additional PCIe lanes to the motherboard) and thus is 3-way SLI ready.

So let me put it simply: The first Big Bang branded mainboard, Trinergy is designed with high-end technologies including nVidia nForce 200 SLI technology, Quantum Wave audio processing with the latest THX TruStudio PC and Creative EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0. The second one, the Fuzion, is perfectly the same motherboard that uses an Intel P55 platform board and a Lucid HYDRA chip that adds support for different brands and models of GPUs in the same system.

The truly extensive feature set and the fact that the Hydra chip does require you to dig deep in your wallet, means you can expect a sales price of a massive 329 / 389 USD, but granted this is one spicy motherboard to fool around with alright.

Let's head on over to the next page where we'll start up this review.