Lucid Announces HYDRA 200, MSI Confirms Use on Big Bang Motherboard

Category: Motherboards
Posted: September 23, 2009 04:39PM
Author: jammin

Last month we saw some shots of MSI's upcoming 'Big Bang' motherboard which showed Lucid's HYDRA engine chip placed to take on multi-GPU duties. Lucid has now announced the HYDRA 200 processing engine, which allows combinations of GPUs to work together, whether you favor the red team or the green team, or even a bit of both. The chip is a 65nm package that draws under 6W and comes in three versions, one of which supports up to four GPUs. It also does away with GPU-GPU connectors (your SLi or CrossFire bridges).

MSI has also confirmed that it will be featuring the HYDRA chip on its Big Bang P55 motherboard, which it has been previewing at the Intel Developer Forum event this week. It will feature three PCI Express slots, so should make for some interesting GPU configurations. It should be available for the holiday season, though without an official price tag as yet. The thought of finally being able to throw whatever GPUs you like into a system is an exciting one, though we will wait for some hard performance numbers before writing off SLI and Crossfire as obsolete. Should you come across any, then please let us know.