MSI X79A-GD65 X79 Motherboard Review

MSI are a brand that we haven't dealt with much in the past, and that comes down to a very good reason. We at eTeknix are mainly based in the United Kingdom, and sadly over the years, MSI aren't at the position that they once were a short time ago. Due to this, it makes it hard for us as reviewers to get hold of kit to showcase to you, our loyal fans and readers, but after a chance meeting at CES 2012, we had a word with MSI to try and change this, and here we are today with a top level motherboard from them in the form of the X79A-GD65. The MSI X79A-GD65 isn't the newest board out, and with Intel releasing their Z77 chipset soon, some may see it as old hat, but X79 is still the powerhouse platform for consumers, unless you want to go up to the uber expensive Xeon range of boards like some of the upcoming dual socket boards, but how many consumers seriously have that kind of money to throw around? Especially with the top level CPU coming in at a staggering $1700, let alone buying two of them plus the price of the board, memory and so much more. Without getting away from the subject to much, we're big fans of the X79 chipset and socket LGA2011 generally, and it's always interesting to see what different brands end up doing when they get their chance and with a strong set of technologies behind them and military class III components, we can only hold high hopes for the GD65 from MSI. As always, we're take a look at the package on offer before we delve straight in and look at the board and what features it incorporates. Once the eyecandy is out of the way, as per the norm, we're sling it onto our test bench and coupled with our Intel 3960X processor, a large chunk of super-fast Kingston DDR 2133MHz memory and our graphics card of choice; the GTX 580, we're see what this board can do, not only at stock, but also how far we can clock things and ramp it up. The package is quite simple but to the point with a large Military Class II logo, X79A-GD65 branding and some of the main features being highlighted, including 1 second overclocking through use of OC Genie II, SLI and CrossFireX technology, i7 support from Intel, PCI-Express Gen 3 and MSI Click BIOS II. Certainly an interesting packaging for us, as its something new compared to what we've seen before due to this new start with MSI for us. Turning the box around, we get a lot more information brought to us with a clear push for the Military Class III components from DrMOS II to the solid capacitors used. The main features that were shown on the front are also explained in more detail here, with a comparison between PCI-Express 2.0 and PCI-Express 3.0 as well as showing off their latest Click BIOS II UEFI interface. Normally we would see a view of the board layout here, but instead, MSI have opted to show you the rear I/O instead which looks plentiful and ample for all types of users. Now in regards to the added accessories, you may want to grab a cuppa as this could take a while due to the amount of stuff we get bundled in. First up we find the paperwork side of things and even this includes a huge bundle with a software application guide, user manual, quick installation guide, driver installation and utility disc and certification of quality & stability with the Military Class II stamp of approval. Also included is a rear I/O panel shield plate, singular SLI adapter, V-Check cable with quick guide, M-Connector and installation guide, USB 3.0 expansion bracket, eSATA expansion bracket and accompanying eSATA data and power cables. Lastly we find a total of four SATA data cables which are all right-angled as well as two Molex to SATA power adapter cables. MSI really have though about everything with the accessories on the X79A-GD65 and nothing springs to mind that they may have missed. The board conforms to a standard ATX form factor and has a very nice looking design with a contrast of the dark coloured PCB and lighter blue accented aspects. The cosmic blue heatsinks really set the board off and with a spacious, yet low-profile design, we can see this being a bit hit with overclockers and gamers alike. Around the CPU socket we find plenty of room thanks to the single passive heatsink design, which incorporates a single heatpipe which is flat in certain sections and arches around some of the DIMM slots. The rest of the CPU socket area is very subtle and spacious allowing room for larger type coolers or custom watercooling solutions. The single heatpipe moves down the board to the MSI branded heatsink which covers the X79 chipset. The cooling solution here is a passive, low-profile design which sports the blue used in other areas of the board with some subtle yellow stripes. On the right side of the CPU socket, we find tucked behind the single heatpipe, that there are two black DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of memory, with speeds of 1066, 1333, 1600, 1800, 2133 and 2400 in quad channel memory mode. On the other side of the socket, we find the other two DIMM slots with the same support. When we move over to the expansion slots, we find a nice setup of five PCI-Express x16 slots but this is where things get a bit complicated. With the PCI_E1 slot, things run at x16, the same as PCI_E4 so that you can run two graphics cards at x16 speeds absolutely fine. If using PCI_E6 for a third card however, you'll then be restricting PCI_E4 to run at x8 speeds with PCI_E6 and this is possible due to PCI_E1, PCI_E4 and PCI_E6 being gen 3 based slots. The other two x16 style slots (PCI_E2 and PCI_E5) only support x1 speeds so don't let this decieve you. There is also a single PCI-Express x1 slot in between. In terms of multi-GPU technology, you will have the functionality for Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX. Panel connectors and headers include the usual suspects starting from left to right with front panel audio, FireWire 1394, MSI VoiceGenie header, TPM module connector, two lots of front panel connectors, native USB 3.0 and also two USB 2.0 ports. Moving around the board a bit you'll also see the designated area for the V-Check connectors which come supplied and this is situated just by the ATX 24-pin power connector. It's also worth noting that a BIOS switch is close by for moving from the two BIOS versions. Also nearby is a debug POST LED, Direct OC buttons incorporating a base clock plus and minus, power button and OC Genie button which allows for a super-fast 1 second overclocking result, and it should be interesting to see how far MSI let you take your chosen processor through this method. Keeping our eye on power as we move around the board, we can see that as well as the ATX 24-pin, an 8-pin power connector is present at the top of the board to provide extra power to the CPU and memory. Taking a look at the storage capabilities, we can see a total of eight SATA ports. The two vertical ports on the right are powered by the Intel X79 chipset and operate at SATAIII (6Gb/s) speeds, while the four black SATA ports also run from the X79 chipset, but only run at SATAII (3Gb/s) speeds. The other two ports (white) are powered by the ASMedia ASM 1061 chipset and provide SATAIII speeds again. Now when it comes to RAID support, only the Intel X79 based ports have any support, with RAID 0 and RAID 1 being supported on the faster SATAIII ports on the right, whereas the four black SATAII ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and RAID 10 with the ASMedia ports having no RAID support at all. Taking a look at what's on offer when it comes to the rear I/O, we find a combo PS/2 port, a total of eight USB 2.0 ports, a reset CMOS button tucked away nicely, Coaxial audio out, optical S/PDIF and an ageing FireWire port. There are also two USB 3.0 ports which use the NEC D720200 controller, Gigabit LAN through use of the Realtek 811E controller and at the very end we find Realtek ALC892 sound supplied through 8-channel audio ports with jack sensing technology. This is our first time getting down and dirty with the MSI BIOS for a prolonged amount of time, and due to this, we weren't sure as to what we should expect. On entrance to the BIOS, we can see a UEFI GUI based BIOS, branded as Click BIOS II. The BIOS is very graphically intense and probably the best looking BIOS we've seen to date with an easy navigation system that we will briefly guide you through. Being a UEFI based Click BIOS II, we have full functionality of the keyboard and mouse for easy navigation throughout. There is the ability to change controller settings including the LAN configuration and SATA mode which can be changed between IDE, AHCI and RAID. In terms of keeping a close eye on things, there is a screen devoted to your PC health status, allowing you to control each of the fan headers and also checking on CPU and system temperatures and fan speeds throughout. For boot devices, a full screen with boot order list is displayed, where you can also change the priority of disk drives, USB drives and much more. Now this is where things get interesting for us as it's all about overclocking. Within this menu you can change the frequency of your processor, adjust processor related characteristics and also toy with the memory and its timings. There is also a section on the same page, devoted to voltages allowing the memory and CPU voltages to be increased if need be when overclocking. You can even save and load Overclocking profiles, which is handy if you are trying to push your system to the limits. More CPU related options are available in terms of Hyper-threading, C1E support and the ability to alter each individual core ratio. The CLICK BIOS II also includes some relevant tools to make your experience with an MSI board a pleasant one. We can do a seamless HDD backup, live update or flash the BIOS easily and quickly. To test this board, we are able to run all of our tests at stock speeds using a pre-defined setup of hardware. We will also be overclocking the processor to 4.6GHz to see how the board compares against the stock speed. Also in terms of overclocking, we will be looking to see how far we can push the processor. Test system: MSI X79A-GD65 Intel Core i7 3960k Kingston HyperX 2133MHz 16Gb Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050 Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 3 x AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Comparison used: Overclocked to 4.6GHz Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: 3DMark 11 AIDA64 ATTO Cinebench R11.5 CPU-Z Heaven PCMark 7 Metro 2033 Super PI Normally for all of our testing on a socket 2011 board, we use an i7-3960X C0 stepping CPU, however Intel were nice enough to grace us with a C2 retail version of the 3960X so we have upgraded our X79 platform with this processor which should allow for clearer and better results, especially when overclocking. Now that we're armed with our C2 stepping processor, we were keen to take a look at how things overclock and most boards allowed us for a stable 4.8GHz, but being MSI, we assumed that it had a bit more to give. First thing was first, to see how easy the chip could be pushed to 4.6GHz for our comparison testing, and this was a breeze to achieve with little settings needing to be changed. We then tried for 4.8GHz and once again, things were fairly simple, with a few other select options needing to be tweaked. With a good 4.8GHz laid out in front of us, we wanted to aim for that magical 5GHz to show that the GD65 from MSI really can compete with the best in the business. After speaking to MSI and altering both the multiplier and bus speed, we finally managed to settle on 5040MHz with use of the 48x multiplier and a 105MHz bus speed at a fairly low 1.5V. We say low, purely because we've seen other boards require a little more juice to get to the magical 5GHz number we saw today. We made sure that everything was stable at this speed, and that of course; temperatures were within a reasonable range of what we're acceptable with and once it had proved to be stable, we aimed to push things even higher. Sadly, no matter how many settings you tweaked, or how many extra volts were chucked at it, this chip did not want to go above 5040MHz, through use of the BCLK or the multiplier, but with a 5GHz overclock at 1.5V, we certainly weren't going to grumble about it. Cinebench R11.5 CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It's completely free. A solid 9.65 score at stock, where the 4.6GHz overclock took the CPU score up to 13.24; a very respectable set of numbers. Super PI Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits. Super PI gave us a respectable time of 10.11 at stock. The overclock to 4.6GHz managed to shave 3 minutes from the calculation time, bringing it down to 7.31 minutes. 3DMark 11 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. 3DMark 11 showed some good, solid results, with the overclock edging slightly ahead in the Extreme preset, while the Performance preset showed more of an increase. Unigine Heaven 2.5 Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies and utilises the full effect of DirectX 11 and allows you to configure shaders, tessellation and quality settings to your own personal choice. With heaven being a GPU intensive benchmark, we only saw a slight increase when overclocking the GD65, with a maximum of a 1FPS increase over stock results. Metro 2033 Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. Very much the same story with Metro 2033, though a very small increase was seen at both resolutions when moving from stock to overclocked speeds. AIDA64 AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Taking a look at memory speeds, we find that in AIDA64, our memory read, write and copy were at reasonable levels for a quad channel kit of 2133MHz. When overclocked, we saw large increases across all three tests, with the read speed surpassing 20,000Mb/s speeds with the write and copy not to far behind.ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Our HyperX SSD showed some solid performance with 557.9MB/s read and 502.9MB/s write. When overclocked, we did see a slight gain on the write speed, bumping it up to 511.3MB/s. PCMark 7 PCMark 7 provides a set of 7 suites for measuring different aspects of PC performance with a high degree of accuracy. Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark Suite. The Lightweight Suite measures the capabilities of entry level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the full PCMark suite. Common use performance is measured by the Entertainment, Creativity and Productivity scenario suites. Component performance is measured by the Computation and Storage hardware suites. The Storage suite is ideal for testing SSDs and external hard drives in addition to the system drive. PCMark7 showed a stock result of 4754 which is better than what we've seen on other boards. When overclocked, over 1000 extra points were gained, with room to tweak other components to increase this further. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. When looking at our Kingston USB flash drive, we found a good read speed of 212MB/s at stock, and the overclock assisted by increasing this by 15MB/s. The write speed also saw a gain, but of a smaller nature of 3MB/s.To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the system takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. The board at idle used a low 122 Watts, though when loaded, it seemed to chug along at quite a large amount of 375 Watts. When overclocked, we saw the load power consumption jump to a staggering 422 Watts. While we say this is high, it's fairly normal for an X79 based system with large amounts of memory and a high-end graphics card, but this board is higher than what we've seen from other X79 based boards. This is the first MSI board that we've tested, and hopefully shouldn't be the last. We explained about the market share that MSI have in the UK, and how this has had a negative effect with review sites but we will hopefully change that, starting with what we've seen today. The X79 chipset is still very much alive and well, as some may consider the upcoming Z77 as the new kid on the block, though it's not quite arrived yet. Some will argue due to this, that X79 will die, but we can assure you that is not true. X79 will be around until the next big launch that will supersede it. Until then, we will continue to look at X79 based motherboards. The X79A-GD65 from a first glance, is a very nice looking board, with plenty of features and a great looking colour scheme. It seems to give off a professional feel, but also tells you that it means business in terms of performance and of course overclocking. Talking about the features, it's nice to see a board like this incorporating some high-end features, including the overclocking buttons, V-Check voltage points and native USB 3.0. There is also plenty of flexibility when it comes to the expansion slots, and utilising the full capabilities of AMD CrossFireX or Nvidia SLI. The performance of the board was pleasing to say the least, with strong results at stock that we're able to compare with other boards from the X79 lineup. When taking a look at other reviews from socket X79 based boards, we find this to be part of the "upper crust" of the high-end boards. Overclocking has had mixed results by myself, as the start really did end up with me wanting to throw it out of the window, but this was more my fault than MSI's. Simply because this is a new type of board, with a slightly different BIOS, it seemed that 4.6GHz was the limit for me, but after speaking to the nice guys and MSI, I ended up missing one vital setting which allowed for us to reach a stonking 5GHz. The overclocking settings were relativiely simple, once I had got my head around things, and can only praise MSI for the assistance they gave, as this overclock really does rival the likes of the Asus Rampage IV Extreme, which is a fantastic acomplishment to say the least. The BIOS is strong, albeit a bit strange for someone who may be used to the likes of Asus and their GUI offering. Once you've spent some time with it however, you will find that it becomes easier over time and is a very effective BIOS to say the least. Since the time of writing this article, it has become clear that MSI have developed a similar GD65 based board, but using 8 DIMM slots, opposed to 4 like we had. This can open up more walkways for extra memory bandwidth and can lead to even faster performance. With the 8D version coming in at £215.75 it certainly is a great deal to be had. For our first major dealing with MSI and by taking a look at their products first-hand, we can honestly say that we are utterly impressed, as we have a great looking board with oodles of features, fantastic performance and some extreme overclocking; all for just over £200. It just goes to show that MSI haven't cut any corners, and have managed to keep pricing to a minimum to pass back onto the customer, while still implementing their famous military class components to give that extra reliability and stability, especially when overclocking to 5GHz based speeds. A good combination with the 3960X, but while the board is affordable, the processor is not, so we'd simply advise as to pairing this with a 3930K instead, or waiting to see what's on offer in terms of Z77 boards from MSI, which I'm sure we will have available very soon.