MSI Big Bang Fuzion with Lucid Hydra Tested
 

Now the big deal about the Big Bang mainboard is that the board has that Lucid Hydra 200 chip that allows it to support multiple video cards of different brands and models at once. This in theory would allow you to get the extra performance from your old video card and your new card even if one is NVIDIA and the other is ATI. The Hydra 200 is a real-time distributed processing engine that acts as an intelligent graphics load balancer.


All that aside Lucid has an advantage though, if (and only if) they get their drivers right and released very often, then multi-GPU combinations that are vendor independent will become a reality and that certainly is very unique. But next month when this motherboard becomes available, please do not expect a finalized and shiny shaped multi-GPU monster. In its current state it's a nice additional gimmick to play around with for a very limited amount of game titles, and nothing more than that.


The Big Bang Fuzion is nearing perfection, an astonishing product series. Now please don't buy it just for the Hydra 200 capability, right now it's a nice gimmick at best. No, please look at it as an additional feature to play around with on a nicely designed high-performance motherboard that comes with heaps and heaps of features. All this goodness comes at a price though, expect to cough up €329 / 389 USD for this motherboard which obviously is incredibly steep for a P55 motherboard.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/msi-bi...a-review-test/

MSI product page: http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=pr...=&prod_no=1979