MSI's Big Bang Fuzion Motherboard Offers Cross-Vendor GPU Support

Posted 01/08/2010 at 3:52pm | by Bart Salisbury

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MSI has upgraded its product line, offering its second “Big Bang” branded motherboard, the Big Bang-Fuzion. MSI's announcement informs us the Fuzion follows the “great success of the surpassing Big Bang-Trinergy powered by nForce 200 SLI processor.” [sic]

While MSI touts the features of the Fuzion with marketing jargon like “eopchal technology,” “flexible upgradability”, and “near-linear gaming performance”, its announcement is absent any real information--like actual specifications. Luckily, there’s Google. Piecing together bits and pieces from about the Internet, the Fuzion has an LGA1156 socket, capable of supporting Intel’s Core i3/i5/i7 processors, and the Pentium G6950. It uses the Intel P55 chipset, has 3 PCI Express x16 slots, supports SLI and ATI Crossfire and something called Hydra N-, A- and X-modes, a PCI E1 slot with a QuantumWave audio card, and 2 PCI slots. From the looks of it, you’ll only get USB 2.0. It will support 16 GB of 2300+ Mhz DDR3 dual channel memory in four slots.

The unique feature of the Fuzion is the Lucid Hydra chip. The Hydra allows a mixing of graphics cards, which means you don’t have to use twins when cobbling together a dual card system. You can even mix SLI and CrossFire GPUs (or so it's promised).

The Fuzion will only run with Windows Vista and 7--XP is a no go.

MSI says the board will be available mid-January. The Guru of 3D says you can expect a price of about $389.

Image Credit: MSI