A big part of MSI's pre-Computex presentation was about upcoming motherboards that will be equipped with Lucid's Hydra chip and the new driver that MSI and Lucid are working quite hard to launch. MSI is preparing a total of three new SKU motherboards based on Intel's P55 chipset and AMD's 870 one.

In addition to three new SKUs that MSI is probably going to officially launch at Computex, MSI also talked a lot about the driver that brought DirectX 11 and Fermi support, performance increase that is in some situations even better than native SLI of CrossfireX, additional support for more games, and 3-way GPU support.



The three new SKUs are stil not officially named but we guess that chipset name with Hydra sounds like what we'll be seeing with these motherboards. It is important to mention that all three new SKUs will be equipped with Lucid's Hydra 200 chip that has two full PCI-Express x16 slots. The first one is based on Intel's P55 chipset and this one will come with DrMOS and SATA3/USB 3.0 support. The second one is based on AMD's 870+SB850 combination and will have similar specs as the Intel P55 one. The most interesting one is actually a value solution that is based on AMD 870+SB710 combination and although this one will not use DrMOS it will still have support for SATA3 and USB 3.0, as well as a quite interesting price.

The Intel P55 based Hydra motherboard will have a retail price of around €159, while the 870+SB850 will retail at around €139. Bear in mind that these estimated price tags and they might even end up to be cheaper once they appear in retail/e-tail. The value AMD 870+SB710 SKU will have a €129 price tag.



Now that Asus has announced its venture in Lucid Hydra motherboard market, these might get additional attention and might be a viable solution for those that want flexible upgrade options with GPU mixing.