First Hydra 200 equipped motherboard

MSI's Big Bang motherboard, the one that features Lucid's Hydra 200 chip that should allow mixing of Radeon and Geforce cards should be ready and officially launch on October 29th. Anandtech had a chance to check out this motherboard at a presentation of Lucid's Hydra 200 chip.

The P55 based Big Bang motherboard has a high-end model of the Hydra 200 chip, the LT24102. This Hydra 200 model supports one x16 upstream port that talks to the CPU and has two x16 downstream ports to the GPU which can be set to work at either 2x16, or 1x16 and 2x8 or even at 4x8 mode. This also means that it can support up to four graphics cards. This is of course not possible on MSI's Big Bang as it has only three PCI-Express x16 slots, but we have yet to see how good is the GPU scaling with Hydra chip.

As far as we know, MSI will be the first one with Hydra 200 equipped motherboard, unless some other manufacturer is working at it secretly. Here are some pictures of the motherboard and we are quite sure that we will see more details as we draw closer to the launch date.