Hardware Early Look: MSI X58 Eclipse

Ooh... want.

 

This will definitely be cheaper than the Asus or Foxxconn offerings (the ones with SAS controllers) which is a good move on MSI's party -- SAS is a bit of a niche/eye-candy feature at the moment due to price and I'm not convinced X58 alone will push SAS drives down in price, they're in the SSD price range which makes them a bit of an 'iffy buy since you can pick up OCZ Core V2 drives for less/same-price.

But the layout is nice, I'm curious to see how they setup their cooling solution.

As for the 'Turbo' button... anyone thinking factory/BIOS preset overclocking based on an Intel determined stable overclock? I'm thinking along the lines of Intel says "Ok, the 2.66Ghz Core i7 can safely run at 3.2Ghz lets set that as it's 'Turbo'..." (repeat for other processors) ? Can't really think of anything else it'd be for. Maybe crank the memory up a bit too? Since its mysteriously appearing on X58 boards I'm sure Intel has some kind of plan in motion that they can incorporate across the entire X58 range regardless of the board manufacturer.

 

Yeah Bring back the old days and put a turbo button on in. I remember my AMD DX120 running the Norton Commander screensaver at blazingly fast speeds. And playing doom with full screen! wow!

 

The turbo button may have to deal with the power features of Nehalem mentioned at IDF.

Not sure if the exra SATA and IDE are worth it. I would also like to be Creative free, so I hope they offer a different board without the X-Fi.

It's a nice color scheme and looks solid though. Any word on the BIOS? MSI has been experimenting with UEFI, so will this have their "click BIOS" or is it a more traditional "Legacy BIOS"? Will they offer both like they are doing with the P45 boards now?

 

Ah good old DIP switches, had them to overclock my first laptop, could overclock from 200MHz to 266MHz on a Laptop with only 8 screws left over after disassembling it and finding the switches.
Nice looking board too.

 

What's the button between the eSATA and the USB/RJ-45 for? The one with the "rollback" emblem?

 

Clear CMOS.

 

you gotta like 10 SATA ports - I can fill up my CM Stacker case to the limit ;-p

 

Nice mobo , I like the reset ,power etc etc buttons , are very useful because I got a case without reset button

 

SLI GTX280 on an intel chipset dream cheesecake! Looks like my wages for the next 2 months are spent!

 

So far everybody else Except for MSI and Foxconn has a FDD connector. MSI looks good, I would've liked to see Abit too, But alas their prototype X58 motherboard may be DOA. sigh.

 

Never gonna happen anymore, they aren't making high end stuff.

 

Hopefully we'll get to see more from IDF in a week.

 

Best looking X58 board layout imo... on the top of my shortlist

Any idea who MSI's "preferred retailers" are in the UK?

Cheers,

Suman