All right, guys. This is an exciting motherboard for a couple of different
reasons. Number one, it is made by MSI.
Whoops. Here. Number two, it has a three-year warranty. Number three, it features military class 2 with solid
ferite chokes, high seat caps with tandelum cores, and solid caps with a
10-year lifetime. Number three, they have added a Better Business Bureau
accredited business sticker to the outside of the box. So, apparently MSI
is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. This is something I did not know.
Number one, two, three, four. Number five, um, it features the world's first
PCI Express Gen 3 support. So that means
with a supported CPU, you have support
for double the bandwidth of PCI Express
Gen 2. Okay. So that means that a PCIe3 8X slot has the same bandwidth as
a PCIe2 16x
slot. Cool, huh? Okay. Also, Click BIOS
2 has been implemented on this board. So Click BIOS referred to MSI's UEFI mouse
BIOS interface. It has been completely reworked and now it is click BIOS 2. So
hopefully I'll have a chance to check that out on this particular board in the
near future. This is a certified military standard board. So that's with
their military class components. And actually this isn't even right. This
board has a 5-year warranty. This sticker is wrong. This is an Eval unit
from early on. It's possible the decision for 5year warranty hadn't been
made yet. But no, this is a 5year warranty board along with the GD80. So,
what MSI has decided to do with this particular military standard board is
stand behind it for an even longer period of time than they normally do.
Got a couple other cool features. You got your instant OC in the MSI control
center software. We've got the supercharger which allows you to charge
an iPad, so even a larger device at high
speed, even when your PC is shut down. And then we've also got Winky 3, which
allows you to boot up into a pre-Windows OS within the BIOS and do basic things
like browsing the internet should you so desire. All right, we've got a drivers
and utilities DVD, a quick installation
guide in black and white. We have a top quality and stability software
application user guide in color on the outside and black and white on the
inside, which is just fine. All right, we have a rear panel USB 3 header. So, I
can plug that into the onboard header and I can have a couple extra USB 3
ports if I don't have front USB 3 on my case. We have an IO
shield. We have the M connectors, which
allows me to easily plug in my front panel connectors without fighting with
the individual little pins against the board. We also have, oh, look at that.
We've got Vche. So, this board does feature Ve, which allows you to check
the voltage directly using a multimeter rather than relying on softwarebased
tools. We've got four SATA cables. They are all straight to right angle. And
then we have a Molex to SATA adapter. I've actually used that on a number of
occasions for the top uh optical drive sometimes if you don't want to feed a
SATA cable all the way up there. We've also got a mainboard user guide
here. And finally, an SLI cable. So,
let's have a look at the board itself and talk about some of the other
features that are applicable to this board because this is a Z68 board. So,
besides being upgraded with support for
PCI Express 3.0, it has some cool
features. All right, Z68 board. So, what
that means is, you know what, let's start with uh you know what, let's do the general board layout and then we'll
and then we'll get into the Z68 features. So, we've got our CPU socket,
which is an LG 1155 socket right here in
the middle of the board. Around that, we have what's actually a fairly beefy
looking power delivery system. You can see the tantelum
core components around the CPU itself.
And um we've also got a thick No, that's
a okay. Nope, that's a standard size heat pipe connecting the cooling for the
top of our VRM and the side VRM all around the CPU socket. So, we've got
support for Core i3s, Core i5s, and Core i7 CPUs. And then we've got our power up
here. So, we've got an 8 pin power connector in its ideal location. Along
the top left of the board, we have four
DDR3 slots supporting dual channel operation. We have our V checkpoints.
This is a great feature because it allows you to get actually accurate
voltage readouts on the uh we've got two
grounds. Okay, so we've got the PCH, VCC, DDDR, CPU GFX, CPU VTT, and VCCP.
So, all those settings will mean something to you if you're the kind of person who actually needs to measure
them. All right, finally, we've got the or not finally, we've got the OCG
button. So, that's your one-touch overclocking, our 24 pin connectors in
its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board. And we've got some
more fan connectors. I'll summarize the fan headers after. We've got plenty of
SATA ports. So, we've got Hm. Uh, four SATA 3 6 GB per second
ports and two SATA and four SATA 2 3
Gbit per second ports. Although right now it's hard for me to tell you guys.
It looks like these two are running off the Intel chipset for 6 gig per second
ports. And these two are probably running off this Marvel chipset right
here, but it's hard to say 100%. Let me just see if I can see where those traces
are going. Yeah. Yeah, that's what it looks like. It looks like those two are
running off the Marvel chipset. So, moving down, we've got a couple of front
USB headers here. This one with red behind it. That's the one that supports
the additional power. We've got our USB 3.0 header
right here. And then we've got built-in reset and power switches here. And
finally, our front audio header here. I always like to see motherboards with the
maximum number of expansion slots cuz that does give you more options,
especially if you are installing two dual slot graphics cards. So, right here
we have um three PCIe 1X slots, two PCIe 16X
slots, and two PCI slots. So, if you were to install two dual slot cards,
you're going to be left with a single PCI and two PCIe 1X, which I feel is a
good mix given the state of expansion cards right now. You might have some
legacy PCI card, but anything new you're buying, you're probably going to get a
PCI Express version. So, let's go over how many fan headers there are on this
guy. So, we've got one four pin PWM here, one four pin PWM here, two three
pins here, and a three pin here in the middle. So, that's a total of five on
this motherboard. Moving around to the back of the board, we have 1 2 3 four
USB 2.0 ports, one of those PS2 keyboard
mouse combo ports, a clear SMOS button. I I love the clear SIMOS button on the
back. Big fan. Okay, we have optical as well as coaxial audio out, HDMI out, DVI
out, and VGA out, giving you an option for what you want to use if you do use
the onboard video, USB 3, gigabit Ethernet, and 7.1 audio. So, this
onboard audio brings us to one of the features, and that is Virtue by Lucid is
a soft. So, that's a software that's licensed by Intel for use on this
particular platform, which allows you to use Intel Quicksync technology, which is
built into the onboard GPU and your CPU. The onboard GPU and your CPU, the
graphics that are built onto your CPU, but use your dedicated graphics card for
gaming, and it will actually help you switch dynamically between those two
different components when you're doing tasks that are optimized for them. Okay.
The other feature that is unique to the Z68 platform is the ability to use Intel
SRT or super smart response technology
which enables you to use a boot hard drive such as a 1 TB Western digital
black or blue for example. And remember, don't use a green for boot because it's
not optimized for that. and then take an SSD of 60 gigs or smaller capacity and
use it as a cache for your big hard drive in order to get up to a four times
uh performance increase in real world applications. And it does work, by the
way, in case you guys were wondering. This board is fully SLI and Crossfire
ready, which is something I hadn't mentioned before. And I think that
pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the world's
first PCI Express 3.0 ready motherboard,
the Z68A GD65. Well, it's actually the world's second and first cuz the GD80
supports the same thing. Remember to watch out for the G3 and the part number
in order to make sure that it does support Gen 3 PCIe graphics. And don't
forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other
computer videos.