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.