Not long after I started working at a small computer business back in the mid 1990’s we were introduced to a new OEM [for us] they were called Micro Star. We were not impressed with their stuff at first and disregarded them.However, as AMD pushed out the Athlon Processor we found them to invaluable. At the time of its launch there were only two working motherboards. One from a company called FIT [If I remember correctly FIT stood for First in Technology] and the other from, you guessed it Micro Star. We found that the FIT board had sub-standard capacitors on it and would die at random times with blown caps. This left us with one choice. Fortunately for us and our customers that one choice was a good one. The MSI board turned out to be an amazing product.However, as with many things the good times did not last. Starting with the Intel 3x series chipsets we saw MSI begin to drop off in quality and performance. This followed them even into the 4x series products and some of the GPU designs as well. We lost touch with MSI during this period [they often did not bother to return e-mails] and that was that. All was not lost though, at CES this year we reconnected with MSI and had the chance to talk with them directly. We were told in, very honest terms, that MSI is re-inventing themselves and diving head long back into the component game. We saw the Big Bang Fusion [still not ready at the time] and many other products soon to hit the market. With that in mind we have been tinkering around with MSI’s new Big Bang X58 Xpower motherboard. Let’s see if and who well MSI has done with this ‘re-entry’ into the market.*When we first reviewed this board we had two annoying issues with this board. PCMark scores were much lower than they should have been and the USB 3.0 controller did not always want to see our test drive. We eventually found the issue as you will read below. It was due to having beta [not fully tested] drivers sent to us instead of the shipping drivers. We have left the review as originally written but included commentary to show where the beta drivers cause issues. MSI worked with us on a daily basis to resolve the issues we have sending two new BIOSes and offering multiple suggestions for fixes.  In the end it was down to the chipset driver and the USB 3.0 driver that caused all of the problems we encountered…