The BIOS
The MSI Big Bang Marshal comes with their new Click-BIOS, which is perfect for any overclocker. It’s a mouse-controlled and easy to use UEFI BIOS interface. It offers a wealth of options for various BIOS tweaking, including adjustments for CPU multiplier, clock rate, bus speeds, as well as adjusting memory timings, DDR3 speeds and XMP profiles.
Everything within the Click-BIOS is pretty much self-explanitory … it took me seconds to overclock the Intel Core i5-2500K from a default speed of 3.3Ghz to a whopping 4.8Ghz with rock solid stability! See overclocking page.
Installation
As you are aware the MSI Big Bang Marshal comes in a XL-ATX Form Factor measuring 34.5cm(L) x 26.4cm(W). It’s slightly bigger than your average ATX motheboard. Unfortunately due to this XL-ATX form factor, the MSI Big Bang Marshal did not fit in our test bench chassis. So, we had to improvise. After a few minutes of positioning the motherboard, we were good to go. There were no real problems after that. The installation of the CPU, DDR3 ram and PCIE cards were the same … just like any other motherboard, but it’s just the size of the motherboard and the position of the screw mounts/holes that are different.
So one word of advice … make sure your case can support this XL-ATX Form Factor. Don’t assume your full tower case can handle it. The screw mounts are positioned differently!
Note: If you intend to install two graphic cards in SLI or CrossfireX, it’s recommended to install them into PCI_E1 & PCI_E5 slots.Check out the configuration of the PCI-E slots below:
– PCI_E1 supports up to PCIE x16 speed (when PCI_E3 is empty)
– PCI_E2 supports up to PCIE x1 speed
– PCI_E3 supports up to PCIE x8 speed
– PCI_E4 supports up to PCIE x1 speed
– PCI_E5 supports up to PCIE x16 speed (when PCI_E7 is empty)
– PCI_E6 supports up to PCIE x1 speed
– PCI_E7 supports up to PCIE x8 speed
– PCI_E8 supports up to PCIE x1 speed
Test Setup & Procedures
| Processor | Default: Intel Core i5-2500K (33×100) Overclocked: 4.8Ghz (48×100) |
| Motherboard | MSI Big Bang Marshal P67 |
| Ram | Crucial BallistixTracer DDR3-1600 4Gb Kit |
| Graphics Card | Geforce GTX 560 Ti OC (1Gb GDDR5) |
| Hard Drive | Seagate 250Gb 7,200rpm SATA (8Mb Cache) |
| Optical Drive | LG x24 DVD-RW Re-writer SATA |
| CPU Cooler | Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 |
| Power Supply | Adata HM-850W |
| Chassis | Lian-Li Pitstop T60 Test Bench |
| Network | Netgear WG111v2 |
| Monitor | 23″ Samsung (1920×1080) – HD 1080p |
| OS | Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit |
To test the MSI Big Bang Marshal Motherboard, we will be using a test rig based on the above components. As you can see it’s a fairly up-to-date system. Here are some of the benchmark software which we’ll be using:
- Sandra Pro Business 2010
- CPU-Z and AIDA64
- ScienceMark 2
- PC Mark Vantage
- 3D Mark Vantage
- 3D Mark 11
- Unigine DX11
- Aliens vs Predator DX11
For this review, we’ve used a new test rig based on an Intel Core i5 – 2500K (Sandy Bridge) processor running at 3.3Ghz and a Geforce GTX 560 Ti (1Gb GDDR5). The results from the older test rig will be denoted by an asterisk.
