Welcome to another unboxing and first look. This is a bit of a strange product
because we're pretty close to the launch of Intel's Haswell architecture and
that's going to require a new socket, but MSI has just introduced their gaming
series of motherboards. So, it's going to be pretty obvious right from the
start that the Z77A GD65 gaming takes a
lot of cues from the original Z77A GD65
with some enhancements. So, it doesn't cost that much more, but it does cost
more, but you get a couple of things for your money. So, number one is right here
on the front of the box, and that's the Killer E2200 game networking. So, that's
network prioritization for your games. The Killer software has some other cool
features like being able to bandwidth cap certain applications through
software. Like if you want to limit the speed of a YouTube upload, for example,
you can do that. Um, they've also got some Fanatic branding on it. I don't
know how much Team Fanatic knows about motherboards, but at any rate, this
particular series of motherboards is recommended by Team Fanatic, and it
comes with this pretty sweet sticker that looks a little something like this. Other than that, we've got what is
essentially pretty much a GD65, which is a very solid board. One of my favorites
to be perfectly honest on the Z77 platform. And let's have a look at what
they've got to say for themselves on the back. So, yeah, you still get OCG2, which is one button overclocking.
Military class 3, so that's military class components having passed the mil
STD. Uh, well, I'm sure they mean standard, not STD. Uh, 810G testing.
Okay. And then there's the killer Ethernet right there, which it's it's
hard to say how much of a difference that makes over a solid um Intel
networking solution. But when I was using it, what I can tell you is that I
did notice for particularly for me the a
big difference in the convenience level of being able to make on the-fly
adjustments to how much bandwidth applications are allowed to use. So
here's that sticker I talked about before. It's a nice sort of solid
sticker. Got a 3M backing on it. You put that on your case. Should look pretty cool. There you go. What else we got in
here? All right.
Four SATA 3 6 GB per second right angle cables. All right. We've got M
connectors. So, those are for people who have trouble plugging in the little
connectors for front USB 2 as well as front panel sort of switches and
whatnot. SLI flexible black connector.
Those are my favorites. Drivers and utilities. Download this from the MSI
website. Uh software and application user guide, quick start guide, user
guide. Ah, a door hanger. Love seeing
these included. I'm sorry. Busy gaming and I'm not here. So, those are the only
two options. Busy gaming and not here at all. All right. So, voltage checkpoints.
And finally, the back panel connector, which has a new red and black color
scheme. Can you see that B-roll? Awesome. All right. So, let's have a
look at the board itself. Actually, I shouldn't have said that the networking
thing was the only thing that changed about it, cuz there were some other things as well. So, layout-wise, we've
got an allnew cooling solution. So, there's a single heat pipe. It's not a
super pipe. It's just a regular sized heat pipe that leads between two sort of
dragon themed looking heat sinks. They look outstanding. I kind of wish that it
was a design element that you could really appreciate from the top because
most of the time you won't be looking at your motherboard from this angle. But
either way, it does look outstanding, and I do really I I mean, I kind of I
kind of geek out over sort of MOSFET cooling solutions cuz I think they look
cool. Um, so they've changed that. Other than that, the board is pretty much GD65
DNA. So, you've got your LG 1155 socket here supporting up to second generation
Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. All the overclocking features of course enabled.
You've got an eight pin connector here for your CPU power, four pin CPU fan,
and then some more fans that are elsewhere. We'll show you those later.
Uh, four DDR3 dim slots supporting up to
8 gig modules. You've got onboard buttons, which I personally really
appreciate. I use an open test bench a lot. Power reset and OCI, which is the
one button overclocking. These little LEDs up here show you how many power
phases are enabled. Up to eight power phases on your CPU. So it'll really it's
just an indicator of what your CPU load looks like. Here's your V checkpoint so
you can check CPU voltage, DDR voltage, a few other key voltages using a
multimeter rather than relying on software. Your 24 pin connectors and at
its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board. This I love. This is
probably worth like money to me. Like I'd pay an extra few bucks for a board
with a right angle USB 3 because those connectors are so bulky and the cables
are so stiff that when you have to when you try to cable management, it ends up
coming in a big loop like this. Whereas if it's on the side, you can actually
run it somewhere directly without ending up with a big huge loop. So love to see
that we've got two SATA 3 6 Gbit per
second connections that are running off the Intel chipset. two SATA 3 6 gigbit
per second connections running off a third-party chipset and four more SATA 2
3 Gbit per second connections running off the Intel chipset. You've got three
USB 2 headers. This particular one supports supercharger. So that's their
fast charging for tablets regardless of whether it's iOS or whatever else. A
hardware dedicated multibio switch. And I'd like to tell a little story here
about my GD65 board which saved my butt
because we've got we had a bad flash in the middle of a power outage. Okay, so
we were flashing the BIOS, power went out. We had no UPS. It bricked it. All I
had to do was flip the switch and we were back up and running and we had a
review deadline that was coming up and it just totally saved our butts. So,
that made me pretty happy. So, I love that switch. You've got an LED readout
for post problems. Another sort of dragon designed, you know, selfbridge
heat sink. Honestly, these aren't cooling much these days anymore, so you
know, it's mostly for show. um three
four PCIe 1X slots, three PCIe 16X
slots. However, it's strongly recommended not to use this one unless
you are running a third generation core processor. So, that's an IV bridge
processor. It should be noted that you're going to be running an 8x8x mode
if you're running SLI or Crossfire. And I do not recommend using really any Z77
board for three-way SLI or Crossfire configurations because even the ones
that have uh switches on them, I mean, there are latency implications to do
with that as well. So, all right, the other the other improvement that's being
made here is a Sound Blaster Cinema implementation. However, this is a
software implementation. It's still using a Realtech chipset. Um, so it's
hard to say how much of an improvement that's going to deliver in terms of
things like, you know, headphone clarity or whatever else, but at least you get
some more software functionality to go along with your new gaming motherboard.
Ah, and the last thing that I did miss initially was gaming ports. So, they do
have USB ports on the board that are specifically optimized for 1,000 Hz
pulling rates, which some high-end peripherals do support. So, you've got a
PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. I do still like to see these. Four USB 2.0
ports. SIMOS clear switch, uh, optical
and coaxial digital audio out, HDMI,
VGA, and DVI, two USB 3.0 ports. There's
that killer nick port, and you've also got 7.1 audio out. Other than that, it's
a GD65. It's a GD65 with a better color
scheme that costs a little bit more. Do I object to this? No. I mean, I mean, if
if you really think about it, it's like, what kind of a build do you want to
make? Do you want a red one, a yellow one, or a blue one? because you could buy yourself an Empower, a GD65 gaming
or a GD65 and you're going to have a pretty similar experience. Um, you know,
the Empower is obviously O OC certified,
which means that they hand test every board for overclocking. The gaming one
has the better LAN and sound implementations, and then the GD65
Vanilla is the vanilla board, but they all have pretty much the same
functionality and pretty much the same performance when it comes down to it.
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this video about the Z77 AD65 gaming.