MSI P67A-GD65 P67 LGA1155 Core i7 SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,974 words · ~9 min read
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today we're going to be unboxing the MSI p67a gd65 so this is an LGA 1155
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motherboard which means it is compatible with LGA 1155 Intel Core Series
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processors this is a Next Generation platform compared to the last gen
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1156 despite the change in socket number
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which actually goes down by one pin so
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let's have a look at what MSI has presented with presented us with for
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their p67a series of boards so first of
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all we have military Class 2 so basically this is an improvement on the
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military class concept that MSI has been doing for a couple of board Generations
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Now High stability components such as uh
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being able to deliver up to 30% more power being able to last up to 10 years
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so that's the kind of component choices that they're making for the capacitors
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as well as for the chokes the entire power delivery system of their military
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class series components is designed to operate silently and to deliver clean
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power to your parts it comes with a three-year warranty in US Canada and
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Mexico unlike the last generation ones we've got four USB 3.0 ports and four
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SATA 6 gbit per second ports so on the
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p55 uh Intel boards we used to see two and two of each of those okay we have 1
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second overclocking so MSI has improved their OC Genie it is now version two so
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that's their one button overclocking procedure can't really call it a
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procedure if it's one button can you you just push the button it's very simple
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okay we have full support for NVIDIA SLI technology ATI Crossfire which I guess
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is now AMD Crossfire it's Windows 7 ready and then you've also got that
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Intel stuff which we talked about already let's have a look at what they have to say for themselves on the back
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of the board we've got a bit of a reiteration of military Class 2 so eight
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times lifespan for these guys 30 % higher current for these chokes and 10
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plus years so they're saying 12 years of
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Lifetime Under full load gaming or up to 40 years in an office environment so
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there you go so basically by the time this motherboard dies you probably won't
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care is I think what they're trying to say we've also got a couple other
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features here instant OC so that's their Control Center Software we've got
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Supercharger so you can charge your iPad and iPhone at high speed even when your
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PC is shut down that's pretty neat feature click BIOS times 2 so applies
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the UniFi oh yeah EFI BIOS I haven't even talked about that yet so msze p67
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boards feature an EFI BIOS which means that you have support for like a mouse
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in the BIOS it's pretty much a change that I wish we'd had years ago but BIOS
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technology has made a huge leap with this generation of boards from MSI way
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to set up there and winky 3 so that's their um quick boot into a Bare Bones OS
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so you can uh browse the internet and do a couple rudimentary things with your
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board without actually booting into Windows so the motherboard is the first
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thing we find once we open up the packaging but I'm just teasing you with
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that we're actually going to look at the accessories first all right we have a
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multi GPU SLI video link card so I guess
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what they mean is SLI Bridge we have a couple SATA 6 gbit per second cables we
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have a straight one and a right angle okay next we
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have it's taped shut what is this o ooh
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this is exciting okay once I get it out of the package I'll be able to to show
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you guys why it's exciting finally we
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have USB 3.0 header or we have a USB 3.0
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header implemented right on the board rather than having like a goofy internal
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USB 3 slot that then you run a cable to
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and then like run that out the back of your case so this is a header which will
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hopefully support front USB in the future but for now they're giving you a
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PCI bracket with full support for USB 3.0 super speed so two on the back panel
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two off of a header so glad to see that two more SATA cables one straight one
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right angle those are the same as the other ones I guess and then we have a
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Molex to SATA power adapter just in case you don't have enough SATA power
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connectors on your board so here's uh the msim M connector for easily
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installing your front panel switches and whatnot here's an IO Shield which is
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label we have a drivers and utilities disc which you should throw away and download
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the latest we have ooh V check nice so
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this board includes V check point so you can use your multimeter to actually
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manually check down to a much better accuracy than any BIOS reading is going
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to give you what voltage you're feeding to your components here's a quick
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installation guide here is a software
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application user guide so they show you how to use the MSI software that you
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might need to use like Control Center and last but not least the full users
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guide and this is the European version this is a sample board so I'm assuming
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you'll get a North American version with your board if you live in North America
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which not all of my viewers do so that
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was yeah okay not sure where I was going with that guys here we go so this is it
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this is the p67a gd65 I'm just going to
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peel off these stickers one sec overclocking with OC Genie military
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Class 2 we've covered all of that so far so let's have a look at the overall
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layout of this board let's take off all the plastic and
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everything really love the look of this board it's got like just the right
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amount of shininess so there this is actually quite reflective we'll do the
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uh the finger test so you can see how reflective that is okay really like that
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I actually like glossy finishes on things so let's start with the CPU
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socket so here's your standard LGA
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1155 socket okay you've got a lever ARM
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so the the CPU mounting is done in exactly the same way as LGA 1156 up in
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the top left corner exactly where it belongs you've got your 8 Pin CPU power
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connector here are your mosfets so this is your military class mosfets they are
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cooled by one heat pipe between two separate little heat sinks okay we have
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a pwm CPU fan connector we have support
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for up to I believe it goes up to 32
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gigs although please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong but I believe we
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do have support for up to 8 gig dims although I really can't imagine why you
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would need 32 gigs uh at this time but
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uh anyway so four slots supporting dual Channel memory the cameraman's like
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getting away from from me here up here in the top right hopefully he can make
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his way back up here in the top right we have our V checkpoint so you can you've
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got two grounds PCH VCC CPU CPU VT and
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vccp we've got a couple more fans here here is our 24 pin power connector right
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where it belongs on the right hand edge of the board and then moving down here
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is our storage
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so we have four SATA ports two of them
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are rather four of them we have four
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Banks okay so two of the banks that is four ports are say to 6 gbit per second
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and the other two the black ones are going to be SATA 2 that is 3 gbit per
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second okay next we have our front panel
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connectors we have our OC Genie button we have built-in switches for reset and
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power those are very handy if you're testing on an Open Bench like I often do
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we have a USB we have uh oh camera man
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wants to get a better look at those okay we have USB moving over then we have
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fire wire here's our USB 3 header so
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happy to see that finally integrated on a board now let's have a look at our
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PCIe slot layout we we have three PCIe
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1X slots two PCIe 16x slots and two PCI
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slots so I want to explain so two slots is are going to operate in dual 8X mode
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whereas a single slot will operate in PCIe 16x mode so this is just like p55
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now bear in mind there is no measurable performance penalty for running in dual
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16x mode we've also got two PCI slots so
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that's for any Legacy devices you might have that do use PCI and I really like
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this slot layout because it does give you support even if you're using two
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dual Slot Cards for up to an additional one two PCI e1x and one PCI card so
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that's uh oh yeah so cameraman's checking out the chipset cooler you can
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see there's not a whole lot to it there's actually not a whole lot to the
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p67 chipset almost everything is on the
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CPU now including the memory controller and even the PCI E Lane controller so
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here on the back we find a number of things we find 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 that's a
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big number USB 2.0 ports we find two USB
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3.0 ports so that's a total of 10 USB ports on the back panel we have eat dual
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eata support then we also have one of those combo PS2 ports that I'm so fond
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of so you can use either a keyboard or a mouse in it we have a clear seimo switch
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digital audio out is supported in both flavors that is Optical or coaxial we
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have fire wire support just in case you actually own a FireWire device and we
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have gigabit Ethernet we also have support for 7.1 analog audio and I think
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that's pretty much everything I have to say about the p67a gd65 thank you for
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checking out my unboxing and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech
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tips a couple points to clarify about the p67 AG
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gd65 so it does have dual BIOS physical
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BIOS chips so that means you'd have to BK things up pretty badly in order to
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corrupt both of those so it should be just fine whether you're flashing your
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BIOS or doing whatever and I wanted to also clarify what OC Genie 2 does so on
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a a p67 board it still only does CPU
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over clocking but on an h67 board it also integrates GPU boost so you can
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overclock the integrated Graphics core on your new core processor another thing
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I also wanted to mention though is that OC Genie because of some of the
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limitations of the p67 platform is only
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supported on K series unlocked processors so please guys bear that in
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mind if you're planning to use OC Genie