welcome to my first x79 motherboard unboxing this is the MSI x79 a gd65 8D
so there are two versions of the gd65 this is the 8D version I'll get into
what that means a little bit later top quality and stability means we have yes
military class 3 components on this particular board so MSI's military class
concept was introduced a couple of generations ago and basically what it
amounted to was high quality components
that are designed to last a lot longer than the three-year warranty than they
provide than they provide that they provide in terms of certifications and
support we've got Intel x79 chipset supports Intel Core i7 up to extreme
Edition hence the black logo Windows 7 radon including Crossfire X SLI and 1
second overclocking with OC genie2 let's
go ahead and flip over onto the back of the board where we'll find a little bit of information about military class 3 so
we have a second generation of Dr or Dr
Moss we've got let's see three in one package double the thermal protection
and it gives you an LED warning at 115°
and auto shuts down at 130° so you are protected with double thermal protection
interesting highly conductive polymerized capacitors or high SE caps
which MSI claims have up to an 8 Time longer lifespan than standard solid
capacitors super farite chokes were also part and and solid caps were also part
of MSI's military Class 2 concept which provide check this out up to 12 years of
constant F load gaming lifetime in 40 years in an office if you're still using
this computer in 40 years then it is time for an upgrade world's first PCI
Express gen 3 main board brand yes they were the first with PCIe Gen 3 and this
is a PCIe gen 3 board and this one's
actually awesome click BIOS 2 is a
phenomenal layout for the ufi BIOS that
MSI includes on their boards uh click BIOS 1 was pretty good but I'd say's
implementation was a little bit better with click BIOS 2 they've actually got
what I would say is the fastest to navigate BIOS implementation out there
although I haven't seen ASUS or gigabytes x79 boards yet included is a
little diagram of your board pointing out all the different L switches and
slots and what you can do with them there's a couple things here that I
would like to uh actually you know what I'm just going to leave this out and then we'll look at them on the board
itself here is a multi-GPU SLI
Bridge here are your M connectors which allow you to easily plug in your front
panel connectors as well as one of your USB headers here we have USB 3 back Port
uh IO shield with an internal usb3 connector so you can add additional usb3
ports to the back of your system if you don't don't have front USB 3 there's
your IO Shield here's your drivers and utilities DVD go ahead and download the
latest from the MSI website here's a little MSI quick installation guide
showing you how to do some of the basics including hard drive installation CPU
installation all that good stuff okay I'm not going to look too
closely at that SATA cables how many SATA cables do we get we get four SATA
36 gbit per second cables and a couple of Molex TOA power adapters we also get
one of these cool adapters so this is an ESAT to SATA cable a Molex to dual SATA
power cable and then two eSATA ports and a Molex Port so we can plug in two be
drives externally which is great for pulling data off drives um when you
don't have an enclosure handy software application user guide and finally a
user guide for the board itself now let's pull out the board itself because
we have gone through all of the accessories and oh look at that the
board is the package is open where the io ports
were this is a this is an engineering sample board so I don't expect the
retail packaging to be pristine just so you guys know um your board shouldn't
come with holes on the io ports I can
pretty much assure you of that so let's
go ahead and check out the layout so first let's take off this sticker
world's first PCI Express gen 3 we'll
throw that on there and this is an LGA
2011 soft socket so it requires not one
but two lever arms there we go to pull
it up or to rather rather to uh unlock
it it's an enormous
socket and then when you're putting it back down you're going to go ahead and
secure the CPU so this is the PIN protector you'll remove that when you
install your CPU and then you need to put this one in first and then this one
in order to fully lock the CPU into the socket so here's our power delivery
system going around the 2011 socket which is only compatible with LG 2011
processors not backwards compatible don't try and put a 1366 core i7 in
there it's not going to work here we have the 8D portion of this particular
board it does support quad Channel DDR3
up to eight dims which means that if you're using 8 gig dims yes it can
support up to 64 gigs of memory no big
deal pretty out standing so you're going to want to populate all four blue slots
or all four black slots that is the way the color coding is going to work when
you are filling up these memory banks okay up here in the top left in its
ideal location we have our 8 Pin CPU connector and then moving over to the
right it's so funny because this is usually where the vrm is and I see like
four four uh slots here and I want to say now we've got dual Channel DDR3 yeah
wrong wrong quad Channel DDR3 okay so here we have our our 24 pin power
connector and its ideal location along the right hand Edge we have a multibio
switch right here which allows you to switch between two physical BIOS chips
for the ultimate in BIOS profiling and
also to back up in the event of a corrupted BIOS very cool here on the
side we have uh four SATA 3 6 gbit per
second ports and four St to 3 gbit per
second Port so you have some flexibility there over here we have have a post
diagnostic LED then we have a USB 2
front panel header with charging so this allows you this is a high powered one
which allows you to charge your iPad for example high powered devices off of the
front ports that this one's plugged into this is not the high-powered one we've
also got USB 3 front panel and then what
else we got here so we have hm actually
we can check this out so here's your front panel connectors and then we've
also got your voice Genie connector
fascinating so that looks like that's going to be a uh an optional add-on for
this particular board because it didn't come with it we've also got our OC Genie
button which is your one button overclocking built-in power button and
built-in direct OC buttons so that is
your uh your base clock adjustments that you can make with your physical buttons
here front fire wire auxiliary power for
the five PCIe six pin connector so if
you do populate all those you're going to want to plug that in and finally
front panel audio so this board has the works on it in terms of the PCIe slot
layout we've got 1 2 3 4 5 six total
slots remember with all the space that these dims are taking up it's a lot
harder to put a slot here duh I mean look how long they are so you are stuck
with uh six PCIe slots on most of the x79 boards that I've seen so far uh
we've got 1 2 three that are wired up
for 16x con contivity and then this guy
right here is wired up for adex and this guy right here is also wired up for adex
this is a PCIe 1x slot so your ideal
configuration on this board is going to be to go one two three cards in
three-way SL or Crossfire with a single additional slot left over for a sound
card or a raid card or some other kind of card you're not now if you install a
full-sized dual slot card in this bottom slot you're going to want to make sure
that you have a case like the Corsair 800d that has eight expansion slots so
that you're going to have somewhere to secure that cart and somewhere to
exhaust the heat that is coming out the back of it now let's go ahead and have a
look at the io ports on the back of the board so we've got a PS2 Port yes PS2 is
here to stay it just keeps not going away we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 USB 2.0
ports a SOS clear switch here optical
audio out coaxial audio out fire wire as
well as well as gigabit Ethernet 2 USB 3.0 ports and 7.1 audio out so thank you
for checking out my unboxing and first look at the x79 a gd65 8D this is the
board that I am planning to use on my ncixcom channnel for our overclocking
guide so stay tuned for that it's going to be exciting time