so today we'll be doing a quick unboxing of the MSI
z68a gd80 B3 motherboard so the z68a
gd80 B3 motherboard features their military Class 2 concept which means
they have the super farite chokes the high SE caps with the tantalum core
which is very rare evidently you have solid caps with up to a 10year life time
of solid use as well as their OC Genie
technology USB 3 SATA 6 SLI Crossfire X
and full support for Intel's full lineup of Intel core I3 I5 i7 processors on LGA
1155 it features a three-year warranty in Canada and the US and in other
regions I have no idea so here there's just a little bit more explanation of
what military Class 2 means as well as a
list of their features including their win key3 which is uh like a quick OS you
can log into in the BIOS if you want to browse the internet or go on Skype or
not load Windows for whatever reason uh Supercharger so you can charge your iPad
iPhone and mobile at high speed even when your PC is shut down that's a cool
feature as well as their instant overclocking which is obviously tied
into OC Genie which is their one button overclocking press the button you're
overclocked remember OC gen only works with K series processors though okay
three PCI Express 16x slots for up to the three-way Crossfire or two-way
SLI and finally overclock in 1 second OC
gen2 yes so Auto detect overclock CPU
memory oh and the integrated GPU now remember with the z68 chipset the
integrated GPU clock speed is actually going to matter even if you're using a
dedicated graphics card and the reason for that is that the z68 chipset allows
you to use the integrated GPU to accelerate video encoding so that's
pretty cool so that will affect that performance okay here we have extreme
power design so 12 phases uh we have Dr Moss as well as an extra six pin VGA
power connector for providing more power to the PCIe slots we have two BIOS chips
just in case one of them has some kind of a problem maybe during flashing or
whatever the case may be you will have no problem restoring from the second
BIOS chip let me just pull the board out
see we've got some nice environmentally friendly packaging going on here just
going to move that there camera okay see
if there's anything I'm missing here so there's another note about tur
supercharger oh okay so the supercharger USB ports are marked you know what I'll
show you the uh the accessories first and then we'll go through any other features so here's a little map of the
board as well as some key points about
the board that you could find on the box if you so desired drivers and utilities
DVD throw it away download the latest off the MSI website you've got M
connectors which are an easier way to plug in your front USB uh and front panel connectors quick
installation guide 1 2 3 4 sat 3 6 GB per second
cables which are not different except that they are white and then you have
two Molex to SATA power cables IO Shield
uh vck cables so this board features vck which means that you can use a digital
multimeter to uh manually check the voltages going to some of the key
components we have an SLI Bridge remember your Crossfire bridge should be included with your graphics card USB
three rear panel header with an internal
uh internal pinout okay just in case
your case doesn't have extra I have front USB 3 and you still want to use
the extra ports so you've got a user guide as well as a software user guide
all right the board
itself there we are so military Class 2 sticker comes off and oh this is
interesting looks like they've changed the uh they've changed the socket cover
from what they were using before which was uh a piece that goes
under so I don't even know how this one works look at that there okay that's how
it works take off our ocg E2 thing and
let's have a look at the board so why don't we start in the CPU socket area so
here's where your LGA 1155 CPU goes that
will give you uh full support as I I said before for core I3 Core i5 and core
i7 processors here's your 12-phase power design as well as your tantalum core
little guys here so that's part of the military Class 2 concept which is
prominently featured on The Branding on the board we've got our 8 Pin CPU
connector up here and it's ideal location in the top left corner big fan
of that personally as well as four DDR3
slots for dual Channel memory we've got
our 24 pin connector in its ideal location along the right hand Edge as
well as V check points here so we have checkpoints for the vccp CPU VT CPU gfx
so that's the onboard VGA VCC DDR as
well as PCH what is that pch1
p05 interesting as well as two ground
points all right moving down we have two
SATA 3 6 G oh rather hold on hold on just a minute SATA 56 sat 3 4 yeah two
SATA 3 6 gbit per second four SATA 2 3
gbit per second then we have an additional SATA 3 6 GB per second
running off of a third-party controller all right here are our front USB ports
this is the one with supercharge the one with the red background behind it I
don't know if you can see that red background can you um okay and then we've also got our
USB 3 front panel header OC Genie button
power reset another oh no this is a fire
wire front panel header our front audio as well as our PCIe slot so PCI slot
layout we've got uh one two 3 PCI e6x
slots we have two PCI e1x slots and two
PCI slots so if you are installing three
dual Slot Cards you will have left now you got to make sure you have a case
that has an additional PCI slot because it's going to hang over the edge but you
will be left with one PCI e1x slot and
one PCI slot so that's very rich EXP expansion capabilities if you running a
three-way graphics card configuration if you're running a two-way graphics card
configuration you're going to be left with one PCI E1 one PCI and one PCI e16
here's that uh PCI Express six pin power
connector right here so if you are running a few graphics cards you're probably going to want to plug that in
to make sure that you're providing all the juice you need to your graphics
cards here on the back the io Shield we have one of those PS2 uh keyboard mouse
combo ports we have optical audio out a
reset Simo switch I love the reset Simo switch on the back IO I'm a big fan of
that okay we have 1 2 3 4 really four
USB 2.0 ports that's it okay four USB
2.0 ports uh we have eSATA fire wire
dual gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.0 ports so that is still a total of six USB
ports we have DVI out as well as HDMI
out and 7.1 audio out so thank you for
checking out out my unboxing of the z68a
gd80 B3 and let me just see if there's anything that I missed here I don't
think there is don't forget to subscribe to lus detectives for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos