MSI's Big Bang series Fuzion motherboard has been delayed to Q1 2010, and it has attracted a lot of attention thanks to Lucid's Hydra 200 chip that will users to mix various graphics cards. Today we have first benchmark/performance numbers of the chip, and it looks that Lucid Hydra 200 chip equipped motherboards are as real as they can be.

Although there are still some driver related issues that need to be ironed out, the board does offer a decent alternative to the SLI/Crossfire, with the little exception that you can actually mix both Nvidia and ATI card as you wish.

The performance gains have to be taken with a certain pinch of salt as we are still looking at an evaluation board and not the actual retail product which can only be better. The test setup on all previews consisted of Gigabyte's GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard paired up with Intel's Core i7 920 CPU, 2GB of OCZ memory and various graphics cards. This system was connected to Lucid Hydra 200 equipped evaluation motherboard which was connected to the Gigabyte motherboard via PCI-Express card.

The Hydra Engine software works like a charm and it will only get better once it hits retail channel. The performance peaks at around 89 percent in dual-GPU mode and mixed ATI/Nvidia scenarios work like a charm.

All we have to do now is wait for the real motherboard that will appear sometime in Q1 2010. For now, however, it looks like that Hydra might have a really bright future.

You can find the previews over at PCPerspective.com, Hothardware.com and Techreport.com.