What do you when you have a motherboard that is at the pinnacle of its type like the MSI Eclipse and then it turns out that you have a similar board that eclipses it? Well, just change the SLI at the back of the name to Plus! The Eclipse Plus is a high-end performance X58 board targeted at the ultimate enthusiast and performance users. Incorporating MSI’s new OC dial onboard overclocking controls, plenty of extras bundled together and an extra PCI-e x16 slot, the Eclipse Plus promises better performance for your Intel Core i7 processors. How does it measure up?
The major component which has been changed from the earlier MSI Eclipse SLI is the copper heatsink. Seeking to keep everything either black or blue, the new heatsink is painted blue and looks a whole lot nicer than its copper predecessor. The Eclipse Plus is well planned with every component in its place. Even the memory slots have been spaced nicely away from the first PCI-e slot, allowing you to easily remove a DIMM without having to remove your ultra long dual slot graphic card. The board now has four PCI-e x 16 slots with three of them being genuine PCI-e 2.0 x 16 and one PCI-e 2.0 x 4. The board is definitely high class with 10 SATA ports all set at a 90 degree angle and supporting RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD along with two eSATA ports on the back. The back panel also features two PS/2 ports, two RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight USB ports, a 1394a port, the clear CMOS button and onboard BIOS status LED.
This board has been made to support both, SLI and CrossFire X but due to a BIOS issue, it can only handle NVIDIA graphic cards. It does not feature built-in audio but thanks to the bundled Creative X-Fi sound card, you’re still guaranteed high-end audio. The board also comes with MSI’s GreenPower genie attachment for better energy efficiency as well as an extra DLED 2 temperature status device.
The MSI Eclipse Plus’s onboard controls have also been updated to feature controls for energy efficiency, the DLED2 utility and OC Dial control. Through the OC Dial, overclocking is a snap even for the most junior of overclockers as you can overlock on the fly. We managed to push our Core i7 processor to nearly 4GHz before the system became too unstable but a more experienced overclocker could probably do more.
The MSI Eclipse Plus offers users a high-end X58 motherboard with more SLI and CrossFire X options along with easy to use onboard overclocking controls.
MSI Eclipse Plus Specifications :
Processor Support : Intel LGA1366 for 45nm Core i7 with 6.4 GT/s OPI (Quick Path Interconnect)
Chipset : X58+ICH10R
Graphics : SLI / CrossFire X
Memory Support : Up to 24GB 3-channel DDR3 1600 (OC) / 1333 (OC) / 1066 / 800MHz
PCI Express Slot : 4x PCI-e x16 (3xPCI-e Gen2 x16, 1xPCI-e Gen2 x4) / 1x PCI-e x1 / 2x PCI
Drives : 10x SATA (RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD), 2x eSATA, 1 x IDE (two devices)
I/O : 8 x USB, 2x Gigabit RJ-45, 2x PS/2, 1x 1394a, 1x ClearCMOS button
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