Included Extras
The MSI Big Bang Trinergy motherboard is a great design and performer, but one of the most interesting upgrades on the board come with the included extras and, dare I say it, the documentation provided!

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Besides the normal manual, which has been very well for the last year or so, each Big Bang Trinergy motherboard is individually numbered and comes with some interesting documents about its features and overclocking features.  An extra large fold out diagram of the motherboard also will help those less familiar with motherboard easily locate and identify components on the board before installation. 

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You can see here that we got Trinergy motherboard #59 and that it was individually signed off on by a member of the MSI manufacturing team.  The overclocking guide provided actually has some good information in in that beginning overclockers will find very useful include a table with overclocking examples that we’ll show in our overclocking section.  It also includes some details on the features of the board and how to use them, which is nice.  I still have some complaints about the grammar (really, how much does an upgraded translation really cost?) but that is minor.

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MSI also includes a LOT of extra hardware in the box, including power adapters and SATA data cables, a dongle for adding a couple more USB 2.0 ports to your system, connectors to make installing the USB/Firewire/audio cables from your case the motherboard and even an IDE cable.  You will also see an eSATA adapter that allows you use standard SATA internal connections for external purposes and a whole bunch of multi-GPU connections for both SLI and CrossFire. 

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As I mentioned before the Trinergy motherboard uses an riser card for audio connections – and it does provide a LOT of connections including two digital audio outputs and enough analog audio outputs for 8 channels, sub and microphone input.  The audio is powered by a Realtek ALC889 chip and is actually a very high quality configuration that supports true Blu-ray audio support and is even THX certified. 

This other little device is the MSI OC Dashboard and it can provide a way to monitor hardware information like fan speeds, voltages and temperatures and also allows you to set some overclocking settings directly. 

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It connects to the motherboard via both a USB cable (for power) and a data cable into the back panel connections.  Honestly the screen was a bit smaller for my liking on this device but the information it provided was pretty useful.  A welcome addition to a high-end motherboard offering like the Big Bang series.

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Finally, included with the board are a set of V-Check cables that make monitoring the voltages directly a bit easier with your voltmeter.

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