MSI X79A-GD65 8D SLI SB-E Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,718 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to my first x79 motherboard unboxing this is the MSI x79 a gd65 8D
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so there are two versions of the gd65 this is the 8D version I'll get into
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what that means a little bit later top quality and stability means we have yes
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military class 3 components on this particular board so MSI's military class
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concept was introduced a couple of generations ago and basically what it
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amounted to was high quality components
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that are designed to last a lot longer than the three-year warranty than they
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provide than they provide that they provide in terms of certifications and
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support we've got Intel x79 chipset supports Intel Core i7 up to extreme
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Edition hence the black logo Windows 7 radon including Crossfire X SLI and 1
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second overclocking with OC genie2 let's
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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
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we have a second generation of Dr or Dr
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Moss we've got let's see three in one package double the thermal protection
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and it gives you an LED warning at 115°
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and auto shuts down at 130° so you are protected with double thermal protection
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interesting highly conductive polymerized capacitors or high SE caps
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which MSI claims have up to an 8 Time longer lifespan than standard solid
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capacitors super farite chokes were also part and and solid caps were also part
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of MSI's military Class 2 concept which provide check this out up to 12 years of
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constant F load gaming lifetime in 40 years in an office if you're still using
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this computer in 40 years then it is time for an upgrade world's first PCI
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Express gen 3 main board brand yes they were the first with PCIe Gen 3 and this
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is a PCIe gen 3 board and this one's
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actually awesome click BIOS 2 is a
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phenomenal layout for the ufi BIOS that
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MSI includes on their boards uh click BIOS 1 was pretty good but I'd say's
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implementation was a little bit better with click BIOS 2 they've actually got
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what I would say is the fastest to navigate BIOS implementation out there
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although I haven't seen ASUS or gigabytes x79 boards yet included is a
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little diagram of your board pointing out all the different L switches and
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slots and what you can do with them there's a couple things here that I
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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
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itself here is a multi-GPU SLI
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Bridge here are your M connectors which allow you to easily plug in your front
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panel connectors as well as one of your USB headers here we have USB 3 back Port
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uh IO shield with an internal usb3 connector so you can add additional usb3
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ports to the back of your system if you don't don't have front USB 3 there's
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your IO Shield here's your drivers and utilities DVD go ahead and download the
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latest from the MSI website here's a little MSI quick installation guide
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showing you how to do some of the basics including hard drive installation CPU
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installation all that good stuff okay I'm not going to look too
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closely at that SATA cables how many SATA cables do we get we get four SATA
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36 gbit per second cables and a couple of Molex TOA power adapters we also get
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one of these cool adapters so this is an ESAT to SATA cable a Molex to dual SATA
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power cable and then two eSATA ports and a Molex Port so we can plug in two be
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drives externally which is great for pulling data off drives um when you
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don't have an enclosure handy software application user guide and finally a
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user guide for the board itself now let's pull out the board itself because
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we have gone through all of the accessories and oh look at that the
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board is the package is open where the io ports
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were this is a this is an engineering sample board so I don't expect the
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retail packaging to be pristine just so you guys know um your board shouldn't
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come with holes on the io ports I can
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pretty much assure you of that so let's
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go ahead and check out the layout so first let's take off this sticker
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world's first PCI Express gen 3 we'll
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throw that on there and this is an LGA
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2011 soft socket so it requires not one
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but two lever arms there we go to pull
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it up or to rather rather to uh unlock
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it it's an enormous
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socket and then when you're putting it back down you're going to go ahead and
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secure the CPU so this is the PIN protector you'll remove that when you
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install your CPU and then you need to put this one in first and then this one
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in order to fully lock the CPU into the socket so here's our power delivery
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system going around the 2011 socket which is only compatible with LG 2011
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processors not backwards compatible don't try and put a 1366 core i7 in
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there it's not going to work here we have the 8D portion of this particular
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board it does support quad Channel DDR3
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up to eight dims which means that if you're using 8 gig dims yes it can
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support up to 64 gigs of memory no big
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deal pretty out standing so you're going to want to populate all four blue slots
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or all four black slots that is the way the color coding is going to work when
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you are filling up these memory banks okay up here in the top left in its
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ideal location we have our 8 Pin CPU connector and then moving over to the
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right it's so funny because this is usually where the vrm is and I see like
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four four uh slots here and I want to say now we've got dual Channel DDR3 yeah
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wrong wrong quad Channel DDR3 okay so here we have our our 24 pin power
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connector and its ideal location along the right hand Edge we have a multibio
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switch right here which allows you to switch between two physical BIOS chips
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for the ultimate in BIOS profiling and
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also to back up in the event of a corrupted BIOS very cool here on the
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side we have uh four SATA 3 6 gbit per
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second ports and four St to 3 gbit per
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second Port so you have some flexibility there over here we have have a post
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diagnostic LED then we have a USB 2
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front panel header with charging so this allows you this is a high powered one
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which allows you to charge your iPad for example high powered devices off of the
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front ports that this one's plugged into this is not the high-powered one we've
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also got USB 3 front panel and then what
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else we got here so we have hm actually
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we can check this out so here's your front panel connectors and then we've
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also got your voice Genie connector
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fascinating so that looks like that's going to be a uh an optional add-on for
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this particular board because it didn't come with it we've also got our OC Genie
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button which is your one button overclocking built-in power button and
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built-in direct OC buttons so that is
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your uh your base clock adjustments that you can make with your physical buttons
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here front fire wire auxiliary power for
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the five PCIe six pin connector so if
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you do populate all those you're going to want to plug that in and finally
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front panel audio so this board has the works on it in terms of the PCIe slot
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layout we've got 1 2 3 4 5 six total
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slots remember with all the space that these dims are taking up it's a lot
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harder to put a slot here duh I mean look how long they are so you are stuck
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with uh six PCIe slots on most of the x79 boards that I've seen so far uh
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we've got 1 2 three that are wired up
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for 16x con contivity and then this guy
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right here is wired up for adex and this guy right here is also wired up for adex
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this is a PCIe 1x slot so your ideal
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configuration on this board is going to be to go one two three cards in
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three-way SL or Crossfire with a single additional slot left over for a sound
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card or a raid card or some other kind of card you're not now if you install a
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full-sized dual slot card in this bottom slot you're going to want to make sure
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that you have a case like the Corsair 800d that has eight expansion slots so
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that you're going to have somewhere to secure that cart and somewhere to
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exhaust the heat that is coming out the back of it now let's go ahead and have a
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look at the io ports on the back of the board so we've got a PS2 Port yes PS2 is
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here to stay it just keeps not going away we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 USB 2.0
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ports a SOS clear switch here optical
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audio out coaxial audio out fire wire as
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well as well as gigabit Ethernet 2 USB 3.0 ports and 7.1 audio out so thank you
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for checking out my unboxing and first look at the x79 a gd65 8D this is the
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board that I am planning to use on my ncixcom channnel for our overclocking
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guide so stay tuned for that it's going to be exciting time