MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) LGA1155 SLI PCI-e Gen3 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,662 words · ~8 min read
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All right, guys. This is an exciting motherboard for a couple of different
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reasons. Number one, it is made by MSI.
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Whoops. Here. Number two, it has a three-year warranty. Number three, it features military class 2 with solid
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ferite chokes, high seat caps with tandelum cores, and solid caps with a
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10-year lifetime. Number three, they have added a Better Business Bureau
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accredited business sticker to the outside of the box. So, apparently MSI
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is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. This is something I did not know.
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Number one, two, three, four. Number five, um, it features the world's first
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PCI Express Gen 3 support. So that means
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with a supported CPU, you have support
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for double the bandwidth of PCI Express
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Gen 2. Okay. So that means that a PCIe3 8X slot has the same bandwidth as
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a PCIe2 16x
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slot. Cool, huh? Okay. Also, Click BIOS
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2 has been implemented on this board. So Click BIOS referred to MSI's UEFI mouse
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BIOS interface. It has been completely reworked and now it is click BIOS 2. So
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hopefully I'll have a chance to check that out on this particular board in the
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near future. This is a certified military standard board. So that's with
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their military class components. And actually this isn't even right. This
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board has a 5-year warranty. This sticker is wrong. This is an Eval unit
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from early on. It's possible the decision for 5year warranty hadn't been
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made yet. But no, this is a 5year warranty board along with the GD80. So,
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what MSI has decided to do with this particular military standard board is
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stand behind it for an even longer period of time than they normally do.
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Got a couple other cool features. You got your instant OC in the MSI control
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center software. We've got the supercharger which allows you to charge
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an iPad, so even a larger device at high
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speed, even when your PC is shut down. And then we've also got Winky 3, which
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allows you to boot up into a pre-Windows OS within the BIOS and do basic things
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like browsing the internet should you so desire. All right, we've got a drivers
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and utilities DVD, a quick installation
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guide in black and white. We have a top quality and stability software
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application user guide in color on the outside and black and white on the
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inside, which is just fine. All right, we have a rear panel USB 3 header. So, I
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can plug that into the onboard header and I can have a couple extra USB 3
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ports if I don't have front USB 3 on my case. We have an IO
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shield. We have the M connectors, which
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allows me to easily plug in my front panel connectors without fighting with
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the individual little pins against the board. We also have, oh, look at that.
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We've got Vche. So, this board does feature Ve, which allows you to check
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the voltage directly using a multimeter rather than relying on softwarebased
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tools. We've got four SATA cables. They are all straight to right angle. And
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then we have a Molex to SATA adapter. I've actually used that on a number of
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occasions for the top uh optical drive sometimes if you don't want to feed a
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SATA cable all the way up there. We've also got a mainboard user guide
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here. And finally, an SLI cable. So,
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let's have a look at the board itself and talk about some of the other
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features that are applicable to this board because this is a Z68 board. So,
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besides being upgraded with support for
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PCI Express 3.0, it has some cool
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features. All right, Z68 board. So, what
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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
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and then we'll get into the Z68 features. So, we've got our CPU socket,
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which is an LG 1155 socket right here in
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the middle of the board. Around that, we have what's actually a fairly beefy
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looking power delivery system. You can see the tantelum
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core components around the CPU itself.
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And um we've also got a thick No, that's
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a okay. Nope, that's a standard size heat pipe connecting the cooling for the
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top of our VRM and the side VRM all around the CPU socket. So, we've got
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support for Core i3s, Core i5s, and Core i7 CPUs. And then we've got our power up
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here. So, we've got an 8 pin power connector in its ideal location. Along
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the top left of the board, we have four
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DDR3 slots supporting dual channel operation. We have our V checkpoints.
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This is a great feature because it allows you to get actually accurate
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voltage readouts on the uh we've got two
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grounds. Okay, so we've got the PCH, VCC, DDDR, CPU GFX, CPU VTT, and VCCP.
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So, all those settings will mean something to you if you're the kind of person who actually needs to measure
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them. All right, finally, we've got the or not finally, we've got the OCG
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button. So, that's your one-touch overclocking, our 24 pin connectors in
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its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board. And we've got some
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more fan connectors. I'll summarize the fan headers after. We've got plenty of
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SATA ports. So, we've got Hm. Uh, four SATA 3 6 GB per second
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ports and two SATA and four SATA 2 3
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Gbit per second ports. Although right now it's hard for me to tell you guys.
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It looks like these two are running off the Intel chipset for 6 gig per second
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ports. And these two are probably running off this Marvel chipset right
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here, but it's hard to say 100%. Let me just see if I can see where those traces
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are going. Yeah. Yeah, that's what it looks like. It looks like those two are
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running off the Marvel chipset. So, moving down, we've got a couple of front
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USB headers here. This one with red behind it. That's the one that supports
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the additional power. We've got our USB 3.0 header
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right here. And then we've got built-in reset and power switches here. And
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finally, our front audio header here. I always like to see motherboards with the
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maximum number of expansion slots cuz that does give you more options,
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especially if you are installing two dual slot graphics cards. So, right here
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we have um three PCIe 1X slots, two PCIe 16X
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slots, and two PCI slots. So, if you were to install two dual slot cards,
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you're going to be left with a single PCI and two PCIe 1X, which I feel is a
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good mix given the state of expansion cards right now. You might have some
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legacy PCI card, but anything new you're buying, you're probably going to get a
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PCI Express version. So, let's go over how many fan headers there are on this
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guy. So, we've got one four pin PWM here, one four pin PWM here, two three
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pins here, and a three pin here in the middle. So, that's a total of five on
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this motherboard. Moving around to the back of the board, we have 1 2 3 four
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USB 2.0 ports, one of those PS2 keyboard
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mouse combo ports, a clear SMOS button. I I love the clear SIMOS button on the
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back. Big fan. Okay, we have optical as well as coaxial audio out, HDMI out, DVI
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out, and VGA out, giving you an option for what you want to use if you do use
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the onboard video, USB 3, gigabit Ethernet, and 7.1 audio. So, this
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onboard audio brings us to one of the features, and that is Virtue by Lucid is
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a soft. So, that's a software that's licensed by Intel for use on this
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particular platform, which allows you to use Intel Quicksync technology, which is
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built into the onboard GPU and your CPU. The onboard GPU and your CPU, the
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graphics that are built onto your CPU, but use your dedicated graphics card for
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gaming, and it will actually help you switch dynamically between those two
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different components when you're doing tasks that are optimized for them. Okay.
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The other feature that is unique to the Z68 platform is the ability to use Intel
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SRT or super smart response technology
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which enables you to use a boot hard drive such as a 1 TB Western digital
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black or blue for example. And remember, don't use a green for boot because it's
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not optimized for that. and then take an SSD of 60 gigs or smaller capacity and
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use it as a cache for your big hard drive in order to get up to a four times
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uh performance increase in real world applications. And it does work, by the
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way, in case you guys were wondering. This board is fully SLI and Crossfire
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ready, which is something I hadn't mentioned before. And I think that
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pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the world's
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first PCI Express 3.0 ready motherboard,
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the Z68A GD65. Well, it's actually the world's second and first cuz the GD80
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supports the same thing. Remember to watch out for the G3 and the part number
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in order to make sure that it does support Gen 3 PCIe graphics. And don't
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forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other
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