CES 2011: P67 extreme from MSI

At CES, MSI is showing the Big Bang Marshal, an extreme motherboard based on the P67 and a Lucid chip that allows you to extend the number of available PCI Express lanes - socket 1155 Sandy Bridge CPUs are limited to 16. Note however that while the total available bandwidth between the PCI Express ports is up, this doesn’t of course change communication with the CPU.

Although 8 complete PCI Express ports are available (some of which can be deactivated via switches), MSI has not given any details on how they are to be managed. We were able to see that four of them are physically cabled at 16x while four others are at 8x. Although of course we can’t know for sure that all these lanes are functional, appearances lead us to think that the card can work either with 4 ports at 16x or 8 ports at 8x. This would imply that there are two Lucid chips, as one on its own can only handle 32 lanes out.

For the rest of course, MSI hasn’t done things by half and includes a power stage with 24 phases for the CPU, 3 phases for the system agent and 3 others for the VTT/VIO, 3 bios, 3 NEC USB 3.0 controllers which can supply up to 12 ports and SATA 6 Gbps connectors.

Although the price hasn’t been given, we expect it to be in proportion to the number of available ports!