So we have taken a look into how well the MSI Big Bang marshal was put together and now we are ready to put this board through its paces. We will be taking a look at this product from as many angles as we can to see if it is worth your money. Will all of the components that MSI threw together work well under stress? Well read on to find out.
Value - Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The Marshal will set you back $399.99 for a retail box purchase from most e-tailers (some offer open box or returns for a little less). This is a steep price to pay for a motherboard no matter how thin you slice it. But as we have always said, value is in the eye of the buyer. If you are an overclocker or an enthusiast that wants the most out of their motherboard then the $399.99 price might not be too much to pay. You do get a good deal when you buy this product, for us we got one of the highest overclocks we have achieved with our Core i7 2600K in addition to some excellent synthetic performance. We do hope that we see some improvement on our real world performance (especially rendering and transcoding) if that happens then the $399.99 will be a much easier bill to pay. Conclusion - The Big Bang Marshal is an audacious product. MSI has combined a large number of components into one mass and with some thought, engineering and the right component choices they have made brought order out of chaos (sorry I could not resist). We do have some complaints though; we really do wish that MSI had of used x1 mechanical slots for the four x1 electrical slots instead of trying to make the board look more impressive than it is. We would also recommend that you upgrade the BIOS to the latest one available from MSI as we are sure this will help with some of the rendering and transcoding issues we saw with the Big Bang Marshal. To wrap things up we are still impressed with the Big Bang Marshal; it has the potential to really push your CPU to its limits with the right cooling and power supply behind it. Even the $399.99 price tag cannot take away from this. It is one of the better P67 boards that we have tested and that is saying something as we have yet to find one that is really bad. Discuss this in our Forum
