MSI makes a big bang at IDF in San Francisco

MSI and Lucid have been talking up a new mainboard at IDF in San Francisco this week that is a first for PC gamers. The mainboard uses the Lucid Hydra 200 real-time distributed processing engine as an intelligent load balancer for graphics.

What this means in the real world is that the MSI Big Bang (PDF) mainboard that uses the Hydra 200 will support an unprecedented amount of graphics options. For instance if you have something like an NVIDA 9800 GTX in your closet and you want to toss it into your gaming rig alongside your new GTX 280, you can do that and get the performance gain of both cards.



At the same time if you want to toss in your GTX 280 along with an ATI HD 4770 video card you can do that too. The new mainboard allows users to use any video card make and model in the system at the same time. The Big Bang mainboard is based on the Intel P55 motherboard and has three PCI Express slots for graphics. MSI expects to offer the board for purchase by the holiday season of 2009. Pricing is unknown, but you can bet the board will command a premium.