MSI Eclipse SLI

MSI offers several motherboards that are powered by Intel’s X58 Express chipset with the Eclipse SLI targeting gamers and enthusiasts.

In line with its positioning the board is chock full of features starting with MSI’s own DrMOS. This technology has a number of functions including reducing power consumption, lower operating temperatures and also to provide stable overclocking. We found DrMOS worked well during testing as the board’s ambient temperature and power consumption were slightly lower than competing X58 boards that lacked power saving technology. The board’s other big party piece is that it also supports both AMD’s CrossFire X and nVidia’s SLI technology. This means you aren’t restricted to a multi-GPU rig from either company. Another game friendly feature is the board’s built-in X-Fi audio card. In testing this proved a far better audio solution than the standard audio hardware packed onto boards.

Being a high-end board the Eclipse SLI boasts fair overclocking capabilities as well. Scanning the board’s BIOS we found the MSI offered all the necessary overclocking options and backed them up with flexible ranges in terms of frequency settings and voltages.

Using our Core i7 940 processor and 6Gbytes of Kingston DDR3 memory, the MSI Eclipse SLI performed quite well in all of our benchmarks. While it wasn’t the fast Intel X58-based motherboard we’ve tried to date, it was certainly competitive and, happily, was also far more attractively priced.