After a few months of teasing, MSI's newest Big Bang series motherboard, the XPower II, has now been officially introduced, and is marketed as the perfect solution for 'xtreme' overclockers and gamers. Powered by Intel's X79 chipset, the XPower II supports Sandy Bridge E processors and features a 22-phase PWM design with Hybrid Digital Power for an output of up to 770 W, Military Class III components (Hi-c CAP, SFC, Solid CAP, DrMOS II), dual 8-pin CPU power connectors, plus seven PCI-Express x16 (four are PCIe 3.0, the rest are 2.x) slots enabling 4-way SLI or Quad CrossFireX GPU setups.MSI's flagship X79 board also has a SuperPipe-enhanced passive cooling system, eight DDR3-2400 memory slots supporting up to 128 GB of RAM, PCIe 'CeaseFire' switches, V-check points, a Direct OC button, six SATA 6.0 Gbps and four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Realtek ALC892 7.1-channel audio (backed by Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi MB2 solution), six USB 3.0 ports (four on the back panel, two via a header next to a PCIe power connector), a debug LED, Click BIOS II (UEFI), Multi-BIOS, one FireWire connector, and the Winki 3 instant-on OS.

MSI didn't say how much the Big Bang-XPower II costs but we found it on pre-order priced at 431.35 Euro.