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MSI's Eclipse X58 board gets pixelized

by on22 August 2008

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Not as finished as the Asus and Gigabyte boards

A French Website called Syndrome-OC got their hands on what appears to be the first pictures of MSI's upcoming Eclipse X58-based motherboards and although it looks like MSI is getting close to a finished product, it seems like they still have some work to do.

There are a few interesting features that we could spot in the pictures, first of all MSI has gone for a slightly different slot layout, with three x16 PCIe slots, although it seems as if the bottom two slots are sharing bandwidth via a digital switch. The board has two PCIe x1 slots and two PCI slots on top of that. There are also six DDR3 memory slots and the board can accept up to 24GB of memory.

MSI is using its DrMOS technology on this board as well, as the MOSFETs, or APS (Active Phase Switching) technology as MSI likes to call it, are different from the type that you normally see and MSI is using a 10-phase PWM design which is a first as far a we know. 

MSI has implemented a row of buttons which consist of Power, Reset, DLED and Turbo. We're not sure what the Turbo button does, but it seems to be some kind of overclocking feature, or it might enable the Core i7 Turbo feature that Intel announced during IDF earlier this week. We presume the DLED button turns on and off the LEDs on the motherboard.

A CMOS reset button is located at the rear I/O, alongside two PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports, a FireWire connector and two eSATA ports. The lack of audio jacks is suggesting that MSI will be bundling one of its PCIe X-Fi cards with this board. The Eclipse also has what appear to be 10 SATA ports, although four of them are connected to a third party controller, but the pictures aren't clear enough to reveal the details of the controller in question.

You can find the pictures here as well as some more details
Last modified on 23 August 2008
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