Back in the early days of the slot A Athlons, there was only one company that you could trust for both performance and stability. It was not ASUS, it was not GIGABYTE; it was MSI. Their boards were quite simply ahead of the game. When the Gold Finger devices came out, again MSI was at the front of the others in support for advanced cooling and a few other features. But, after that MSI sort of went into hiding. Their products dropped in quality and even in prevalence on the market.Today things appear to be changing; MSI has pushed out their Big Bang line of high performance motherboards. They are working to re-establish themselves in the component market. Products like the R5870 Lightning and Cyclone are getting the word out from the DIY crowd again.We have the Big Bang XPower board in for a look. This board features six full x16 PCIe slots, THX and EAX Audio, Hi-quality caps, chokes and a host of other items that are sure to get you going. Let’s take a look and see what we can get out of it.