he new motherboard from MSI is the P55-GD88 Hydra, also to be known as P55A Hydra. Built on a PCB that's different from that of the Big Bang Fuzion, the P55A Hydra uses High-C capacitors only for the CPU VRM, with normal solid-state capacitors for the rest of the board. Unlike the Big Bang Fuzion it has only two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, but these slots work at x16 speeds. Perhaps the only selling point for Hydra on this setup (since Intel P55 platform already supports both SLI and CrossFire, and tests have shown performance hit between x16 and x8 to be insignificant for even high-end GPUs), is the ability to mix and match different kinds of graphics cards, including mixing an ATI Radeon card with an NVIDIA GeForce card.
MSI prepping more affordable P55A Hydra
Posted on Thursday, April 15 2010 @ 20:18 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck