today we're going to be unboxing the MSI p67a gd65 so this is an LGA 1155
motherboard which means it is compatible with LGA 1155 Intel Core Series
processors this is a Next Generation platform compared to the last gen
1156 despite the change in socket number
which actually goes down by one pin so
let's have a look at what MSI has presented with presented us with for
their p67a series of boards so first of
all we have military Class 2 so basically this is an improvement on the
military class concept that MSI has been doing for a couple of board Generations
Now High stability components such as uh
being able to deliver up to 30% more power being able to last up to 10 years
so that's the kind of component choices that they're making for the capacitors
as well as for the chokes the entire power delivery system of their military
class series components is designed to operate silently and to deliver clean
power to your parts it comes with a three-year warranty in US Canada and
Mexico unlike the last generation ones we've got four USB 3.0 ports and four
SATA 6 gbit per second ports so on the
p55 uh Intel boards we used to see two and two of each of those okay we have 1
second overclocking so MSI has improved their OC Genie it is now version two so
that's their one button overclocking procedure can't really call it a
procedure if it's one button can you you just push the button it's very simple
okay we have full support for NVIDIA SLI technology ATI Crossfire which I guess
is now AMD Crossfire it's Windows 7 ready and then you've also got that
Intel stuff which we talked about already let's have a look at what they have to say for themselves on the back
of the board we've got a bit of a reiteration of military Class 2 so eight
times lifespan for these guys 30 % higher current for these chokes and 10
plus years so they're saying 12 years of
Lifetime Under full load gaming or up to 40 years in an office environment so
there you go so basically by the time this motherboard dies you probably won't
care is I think what they're trying to say we've also got a couple other
features here instant OC so that's their Control Center Software we've got
Supercharger so you can charge your iPad and iPhone at high speed even when your
PC is shut down that's pretty neat feature click BIOS times 2 so applies
the UniFi oh yeah EFI BIOS I haven't even talked about that yet so msze p67
boards feature an EFI BIOS which means that you have support for like a mouse
in the BIOS it's pretty much a change that I wish we'd had years ago but BIOS
technology has made a huge leap with this generation of boards from MSI way
to set up there and winky 3 so that's their um quick boot into a Bare Bones OS
so you can uh browse the internet and do a couple rudimentary things with your
board without actually booting into Windows so the motherboard is the first
thing we find once we open up the packaging but I'm just teasing you with
that we're actually going to look at the accessories first all right we have a
multi GPU SLI video link card so I guess
what they mean is SLI Bridge we have a couple SATA 6 gbit per second cables we
have a straight one and a right angle okay next we
have it's taped shut what is this o ooh
this is exciting okay once I get it out of the package I'll be able to to show
you guys why it's exciting finally we
have USB 3.0 header or we have a USB 3.0
header implemented right on the board rather than having like a goofy internal
USB 3 slot that then you run a cable to
and then like run that out the back of your case so this is a header which will
hopefully support front USB in the future but for now they're giving you a
PCI bracket with full support for USB 3.0 super speed so two on the back panel
two off of a header so glad to see that two more SATA cables one straight one
right angle those are the same as the other ones I guess and then we have a
Molex to SATA power adapter just in case you don't have enough SATA power
connectors on your board so here's uh the msim M connector for easily
installing your front panel switches and whatnot here's an IO Shield which is
label we have a drivers and utilities disc which you should throw away and download
the latest we have ooh V check nice so
this board includes V check point so you can use your multimeter to actually
manually check down to a much better accuracy than any BIOS reading is going
to give you what voltage you're feeding to your components here's a quick
installation guide here is a software
application user guide so they show you how to use the MSI software that you
might need to use like Control Center and last but not least the full users
guide and this is the European version this is a sample board so I'm assuming
you'll get a North American version with your board if you live in North America
which not all of my viewers do so that
was yeah okay not sure where I was going with that guys here we go so this is it
this is the p67a gd65 I'm just going to
peel off these stickers one sec overclocking with OC Genie military
Class 2 we've covered all of that so far so let's have a look at the overall
layout of this board let's take off all the plastic and
everything really love the look of this board it's got like just the right
amount of shininess so there this is actually quite reflective we'll do the
uh the finger test so you can see how reflective that is okay really like that
I actually like glossy finishes on things so let's start with the CPU
socket so here's your standard LGA
1155 socket okay you've got a lever ARM
so the the CPU mounting is done in exactly the same way as LGA 1156 up in
the top left corner exactly where it belongs you've got your 8 Pin CPU power
connector here are your mosfets so this is your military class mosfets they are
cooled by one heat pipe between two separate little heat sinks okay we have
a pwm CPU fan connector we have support
for up to I believe it goes up to 32
gigs although please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong but I believe we
do have support for up to 8 gig dims although I really can't imagine why you
would need 32 gigs uh at this time but
uh anyway so four slots supporting dual Channel memory the cameraman's like
getting away from from me here up here in the top right hopefully he can make
his way back up here in the top right we have our V checkpoint so you can you've
got two grounds PCH VCC CPU CPU VT and
vccp we've got a couple more fans here here is our 24 pin power connector right
where it belongs on the right hand edge of the board and then moving down here
is our storage
so we have four SATA ports two of them
are rather four of them we have four
Banks okay so two of the banks that is four ports are say to 6 gbit per second
and the other two the black ones are going to be SATA 2 that is 3 gbit per
second okay next we have our front panel
connectors we have our OC Genie button we have built-in switches for reset and
power those are very handy if you're testing on an Open Bench like I often do
we have a USB we have uh oh camera man
wants to get a better look at those okay we have USB moving over then we have
fire wire here's our USB 3 header so
happy to see that finally integrated on a board now let's have a look at our
PCIe slot layout we we have three PCIe
1X slots two PCIe 16x slots and two PCI
slots so I want to explain so two slots is are going to operate in dual 8X mode
whereas a single slot will operate in PCIe 16x mode so this is just like p55
now bear in mind there is no measurable performance penalty for running in dual
16x mode we've also got two PCI slots so
that's for any Legacy devices you might have that do use PCI and I really like
this slot layout because it does give you support even if you're using two
dual Slot Cards for up to an additional one two PCI e1x and one PCI card so
that's uh oh yeah so cameraman's checking out the chipset cooler you can
see there's not a whole lot to it there's actually not a whole lot to the
p67 chipset almost everything is on the
CPU now including the memory controller and even the PCI E Lane controller so
here on the back we find a number of things we find 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 that's a
big number USB 2.0 ports we find two USB
3.0 ports so that's a total of 10 USB ports on the back panel we have eat dual
eata support then we also have one of those combo PS2 ports that I'm so fond
of so you can use either a keyboard or a mouse in it we have a clear seimo switch
digital audio out is supported in both flavors that is Optical or coaxial we
have fire wire support just in case you actually own a FireWire device and we
have gigabit Ethernet we also have support for 7.1 analog audio and I think
that's pretty much everything I have to say about the p67a gd65 thank you for
checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech
tips a couple points to clarify about the p67 AG
gd65 so it does have dual BIOS physical
BIOS chips so that means you'd have to BK things up pretty badly in order to
corrupt both of those so it should be just fine whether you're flashing your
BIOS or doing whatever and I wanted to also clarify what OC Genie 2 does so on
a a p67 board it still only does CPU
over clocking but on an h67 board it also integrates GPU boost so you can
overclock the integrated Graphics core on your new core processor another thing
I also wanted to mention though is that OC Genie because of some of the
limitations of the p67 platform is only
supported on K series unlocked processors so please guys bear that in
mind if you're planning to use OC Genie