Cool package
Back in October MSI unveiled the first motherboard of its high-anticipated Big Bang series – Trinergy, but the board turns out to be using NVIDIA’s nForce 200 SLI chip instead of the Lucid Hydra 200 as most of us expected.
Although we have to wait for a while before actually experiencing the Lucid chip on the upcoming Fuzion board, NF200 chip still brings us some benefits for now – it provides P55 motherboard with additional PCIe lanes and thus enables P55 motherboards to run in x16+x16 or x16+x8+x8 modes instead of x8+x8, x16+x4 or x8+x8+x4 modes.
What would happen if we build 2-way CrossFire or SLI setup by using Trinergy? How huge performance improvements it would bring over ordinary P55 platform? Read on to find the answer.
Specs and Features
MSI Big Bang Trinergy specs
MSI Big Bang Trinergy overview (click to enlarge)
Coming bundled with a PCIe x1 Quantum Wave audio card, Big Bang Trinergy motherboard features four dual-channel DDR3 memory slots and three PCIe x16 slots for SLI/CrossFire setups.
Other specs include two PCIe x1 slots, ten SATA 3.0Gbps ports, two eSATA ports, one IDE port, 14 USB 2.0 and two IEEE 1394 ports. It also includes MSI’s patented technologies such as OC Genie, SuperPipe and V-Kit.
NF200 chip
For highest efficiency and durability, the exquisitely-made Trinergy board uses high-quality components including Super Ferrite Choke and Hi-c Cap.
Super Ferrite Choke
The LED light tells you which phase of power the motherboard is currently in.
You’re allowed to connect an OC panel to the board.
the PCH chip on Intel P55 motherboard
NVIDIA NF200-SLI-A3 chip on Big Bang Trinergy motherboard
CrossFire/SLI benchmarks
The P55-GD65 board would automatically switch to x8+x8 mode when you try to build 2-way CrossFire setup.
The Trinergy board was capable of full-speed x16+x16 mode for 2-way CrossFire setup.
Regardless of the big difference of PCI-E lanes bandwidth, the two boards delivered almost equal efficiency on CrossFire setup – dual x16 bandwidth didn’t bring much performance boost, as dual x8 PCI-E bandwidth is already sufficient enough to accommodate the graphics card we guess.
And then we used two GeForce GTX295s to build Quad SLI system – let’s see what would happen.
The results are almost the same – Trinergy only sees an average performance improvement of 2.79%, which means 3FPS quicker in games at the most.
It can be said the addition of NF200 chip hardly bring performance improvement for 2-way SLI/CrossFire setups, but considering its gorgeous appearance and rich features such as bundled audio card and OC panel, the feature-rich board still looks quite attractive to lots of hard-core players.
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