MSI X79A-GD65 X79 Motherboard Review

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.