MSI Big Bang FUZION (the one with the Hydra chip)

[LowBrowser]

New reviews are out on this motherboard. It seems to overclock fairly well (from the Trinergy reviews) and has a decent colour scheme. It seems to work especially well with mixing mid-range cards (if you look at the 9800GTX and 4770 at Mass Effect and COD:MW2), but not so well on the higher end cards. Still if they get their drivers sorted, it looks like a winner. Most importantly it also seems to be stable from what bit-tech say.

Reviews:
http://guru3d.com/article/msi-big-bang-fuzion-lucid-hydra-review-test/1
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/01/08/msi-big-bang-fusion-lucid-hydra-arrives/1http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/01/08/msi-big-bang-fusion-lucid-hydra-arrives/1

[Crow]

Yikes, $400. Needs work though.

[ablatman]

Yikes, $400. Needs work though.

Yes, and that's exactly why I don't think it will sell all that well.

From what I read at those two reviews in the OP, it looks like they tried to cram as much high-end hardware onto that board as they could, but ultimately that ended up pushing the price quite high -- to the point where it costs more than most good X58 boards. As I see it, they should have gone X58 instead of P55 so that the price of the board was more in line with similar boards....

[Darkvine]

I would buy it at $400 once the drivers/BIOS get well sorted out. Though I will likely wait on the X58 they already said would be coming out sometime in the future.

It might be a lot of money now but it can save me some cash later on, being able to use my last gen card with my next gen rather then getting two new ones. if you got a 285 why throw it away or sell it when you get 385?

[ablatman]

I would buy it at $400 once the drivers/BIOS get well sorted out. Though I will likely wait on the X58 they already said would be coming out sometime in the future.

It might be a lot of money now but it can save me some cash later on, being able to use my last gen card with my next gen rather then getting two new ones. if you got a 285 why throw it away or sell it when you get 385?

I wasn't saying that I thought 400 was too much for a good motherboard, just that 400 was too much to pay for a motherboard that's on a low-end chipset/socket. For what the lucid hydra version offers, 400 wouldn't be all that bad if it were an X58 board: highish-end onboard sound/network/etc. (none of this realtec/jmicron bullshit), interesting multi-GPU capabilities....