PCB Design and Functionality

MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard looks very attractive and stylish, sticking to the same black and blue colors that dominate the package design:

If we take a look at the top part of the PCB, we will see that all components are placed in their traditional and thus convenient places. The markings on the heatsinks and stickers remind us of high-quality components that are used during the production process.

It makes sense to mention one of the additional accessories bundled with MSI Eclipse Plus mainboard called GreenPower Genie.

This device monitors all major voltages – 12V, 5V and 3.3V - in real time, which allows calculating the power capacity and efficiency of the system. With the enclosed cable you can connect GreenPower Genie between the 24-pin power supply and mainboard connectors and use an additional 3-pin cable to connect to the SMBus (System Management Bus).

Before we move on to the bottom part of the PCB, let’s take a closer look at the cooling system. The chipset South and North Bridge heatsinks are connected with a heatpipe, while the CPU and North Bridge voltage regulator circuitry components are cooler with a separate pretty large heatsink.

Strange as it might seem, separation of these two cooling systems is presented as an advantage, and not a drawback. We won’t argue about it at this time. Let’s take a closer look at a large heatsink over the South Bridge. The next photo shows clearly two copper contact plates of the heatsink. The one on the right sits over Intel ICH10R South Bridge, while the one on the left – over Nvidia NF200 additional PCI Express bus controller.

The hot PCI Express controller also warms up a pair of chipset heatsinks connected with a heatpipe, but the separate heatsink over the processor voltage regulator transistors doesn’t really help to dissipate the heat. This large heatsink doesn’t really work well, it stays barely warm, while the chipset heatsinks run very hot. I couldn’t touch the South Bridge heatsink during work, and the monitoring utilities reports up to 75°C North Bridge temperature despite very intensive airflow. Although this temperature is still acceptable, it is very high. Therefore, we couldn’t really figure out the benefits of separate cooling.

Speaking of the advantages this cooling system has to offer, we definitely have to mention secure screw-on retention used for all heatsinks.

Black spring-screws are barely noticeable against the dark PCB background that is why we would like to provide another photo taken at a different angle.

I personally, do not see any real benefits in separate cooling systems, only drawbacks, especially with a hot Nvidia NF200 controller. However, this controller ensures that three top graphics card slots work at full PCI Express 2.0 x16 speed and only the last fourth slot can work at x4 speed at best.

By the way, unlike EVGA X58 SLI Classified mainboard, that is also equipped with Nvidia NF200 controller, there are no questions about the way multi-GPU technologies get implemented on MSI Eclipse Plus. You can see “CrossFireX Ready” and “Multi-SLI Ready” written right between the first two PCI Express x16 slots.