Much has been made of MSI's Big Bang Fuzion motherboard - the second product to emerge from the Big Bang line - and though the jury's still out in regards to multi-GPU performance of LucidLogix's Hydra 200 chip, we do now have a price to attach to MSI's eagerly-anticipated board.
Over in the US, popular retailer NewEgg.com has the board listed at a massive $369.99 - making it the retailer's single most expensive P55 offering. UK readers, that works out at around £230 excluding tax, but we've yet to see the board appear at any UK-based retailer.
It's a big price to pay, but then this is the first consumer board to carry the Lucid Hydra 200 chip - which, you'll recall, allows the end user to mix-and-match graphics cards for a multi-GPU configuration that'll work irrespective of GPU brand.
Three PCIe x16 slots are available to make use of the multi-GPU capabilities, with two cards running at x16 and x16 or a three-GPU setup configured as x16, x8, x8.
Elsewhere, the board offers two PCIe x1 slots, two PCI slots, four dual-channel DIMM slots supporting up to 16GB of DDR3 memory at speeds of up to 2,300MHz, and a total of ten SATA II ports. Audio comes courtesy of bundled QuantumWave sound card, and there's the usual array of MSI performance goodies - including DrMOS, SuperPipe and OCGenie.
An impressive feature set, though, considering the price tag, we're disappointed by the fact that the board doesn't support either SATA 6Gbps or USB 3.0 - both of which do feature on MSI's cheaper P55-GD85.
Still, if the Lucid Hydra 200 chip can deliver on MSI's promise of "near-linear gaming performance", this one could become a favourite among the gaming crowd.
