IN THE LAB^
REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWAREA
n eclipse occurs when one celestial
body obscures another. When MSI
stuck its X58 motherboard with that
moniker, we wondered just what it wanted
to hide. Our guess is it’s the fact that the
board supports ATI’s CrossFire X. Despite
the Eclipse’s support for CrossFire X, MSI
chose to change the name of the board
at the last minute from simply Eclipse to
Eclipse SLI. Regardless, the Eclipse SLI is
jam-packed with features that would make
any geek weep, including cross-platform
GPU support, Core i7, six-slot DDR3, and
onboard soft X-Fi audio.We’ve now tested three X58 boards, and
the Eclipse SLI has an edge over its closest
competitor, the Asus P6T Deluxe, which we
reviewed in January, as well as the stock
Intel DX58SO board that we used for most of
our Core i7 testing. The Eclipse SLI is techni-
cally able to run tri-SLI. We say technically
because though you might be able to jam a
GTX 280 into the third slot, you’ll probably
have to saw off the end of the card to make
it fi t in your case—the card has to be seated
in the bottom slot and hangs over the mobo
by about an inch. We tested the Eclipse with
a pair of EVGA GTX 280 cards but were un-
able to test it in tri, as our early board
shipped without a bridge. MSI will
include bridges with retail boards.
Right now, it’s diffi cult to com-
pare the performance of the three
X58-based boards we’ve tested, as it’s
challenging to make sure the boards
are all set to the same
specs. We attribute
most of the perfor-
mance diff erences
we’ve seen to howeach vendor sets up the CPU, not to the per-
formance diff erences with each board. One
thing in the Eclipse’s favor: There’s no need
to activate the X-Fi drivers on the board,
which is necessary on the Asus boards that
feature host-based X-Fi drivers.
So what board would we stick our Core
i7 in? It’s hard to say at this point, but if we
were forced to choose, the Eclipse SLI would
just edge out the Asus P6T Deluxe. But to
be honest, with BIOS updates coming out
in near real time for the new CPU and new
chipset, the answer to that question might
be diff erent next month. – G O R D O N M A H U N GMSI Eclipse SLI
Alphabet soup heaven: Tri-SLI, i7, and X-Fi
We can hear the
scream from Ontario:
“It does CrossFire X
too, damn it!”82 | MAXIMUMPC | FEB 09 | http://www.maximumpc.com
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VERDICT$360, http://www.msicomputer.com9
Tri-SLI capable, six
DIMM slots, and no X-Fi
activation required.Questionable placement
of third x16 slot; flaky
USB support.STRIDERMSI ECLIPSE SLIBUCKPC Mark Vantage x64 7,204 7,082
PCMark Vantage HDD 4,225 3,509
ProShow Producer (min:sec) 9:08 9:12
MainConcept Reference (min:sec) 17:58 18:00
3DMark Vantage CPU 11,257 11,239
3DMark Vantage GPU 46,410 45,424
HD Tach (MB/s) 219 185
Valve Particle test (fps) 160 155
Quake 4 (fps) 237.5 224
Everest Ultimate Copy RAM (MB/s) 19,766 19,182
Everest Ultimate Latency (ns) 32. 3 31.9
Sisoft Sandra RAM Bandwidth(GB/s) 27.1 26.3
Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of a Core i7-965 Extreme Edition,
EVGA GeForce GTX280 videocard, 6GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3/1600, WD
Raptor 150 and Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Our HD Tach score was achieved using
an Intel X25-M SSD.BENCHMARKS
MSI Eclipse SLI IntelDX58SO