Gaming-geared hardware maker MSI's new P67 board, designed to work with Intel's new LGA1155 Sandy Bridge CPUs, will compete with Intel's first-party board designs.  If you have the money, MSI Big Bang Marshal, revealed by Semiaccurate, hands you some serious firepower for your buck.

The board's eight slots may leave you blinking -- no those aren't slots for RAM DIMs, they're 8 full-size x16 PCI Express slots.  Four of the slots operate at x16, while four are truly operating at the bandwidth of a typical x8 slot.  Still, that's way more bandwidth than Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset or a single nForce 200 chipset could handle.  Instead, the board leverages the top secret upcoming Lucid Hydra chip.  Unlike previously previewed Hydra chips, this is an actual bridge chip, so you probably can't mix and match GPUs, unfortunately.

The four true x16 PCI Express lanes are each wired to a DIP switch in a blue bank that allows you to quickly turn off a lane.  The featured, dubbed PCI-E CeaseFire, is much request by overclockers, who could use it to turn off undesired lanes, or to turn off a lane that was becoming unstable.

The board has four DDR3 DIMM slots and will likely support up to 32 GB of RAM.

To funnel power to its army of components, the board utilizes a 24 phase DrMOS PWM design, with chips mounted both on the front and back of the board.  The board also features four SATA 3Gbps ports, four SATA 6Gbps ports (two via a Marvell 9128 controller), three manually switchable BIOS chips, two USB 3.0 pin headers for four ports, three USB 2.0 pin headers for six ports, a POST80 debug LED display, a FireWire header, a serial port header, a power, reset and OC Genie buttons, and a multimeter measurement point.  The board features MSI's ClickBIOS, which is MSI's pet name for UEFI.

Outputs on the back of the board include a PS/2 port, two USB 2.0 ports, eight USB 3.0 ports (using a single host controller and two hubs), two USB 2.0/eSATA combo ports, a FireWire port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.

The board has not yet seen its final revision and price is still up in the air.

MSI has already excited with other P67 designs, including its 32 GB of DDR3 RAM-ready GD65, which doesn't feature quite so many x16 PCI Express slots.  A number of other MSI P67 boards have also already been previewed, but none are quite as formidable or extravagant as the Big Bang Marshal.