Gadgetory

welcome to my first x79 motherboard unboxing this is the msi x79 AGD 65 8d so there are two versions of the GD 65 this is the 8d version I'll get into what that means a little bit later top quality and stability means we have yes military class three components on this particular board so MSI's military class concept was introduced a couple of generations ago and basically what it amounted to was high quality components that are designed to last a lot longer than the three-year warranty then they provide then they provided that they provide in terms of certifications and support we've got intel x79 chipset supports intel core i7 up to extreme edition hits the black logo windows 7 Radeon including crossfire X SLI and one second overclocking with OC Genie - let's go ahead and flip over onto the back of the board where we'll find a little bit of information about military class 3 so we have a second generation of dr or dr moths we've got let's see three in one package double the thermal protection and it gives you an LED warning at 115 degrees and auto shuts down at 130 degrees so you are protected with double thermal protection interesting highly conductive polymerized capacitors or hi-c caps which msi claims have up to an eight times longer lifespan than standard solid capacitors super ferrite chokes were also part and CM solid caps were also part of MSI's military class ii concept which provide check this out up to 12 years of constant full load gaming lifetime and 40 years in an office if you're still using this computer in 40 years then it is time for an upgrade world's first pci express gen3 mainboard brand yes they were the first with PCIe gen3 and this is a PCIe gen3 board and this one's actually awesome click BIOS to is a phenomenal layout for the UEFI BIOS set in the includes on their boards click BIOS one was pretty good but I'd say Seuss's implementation was a little bit better with click BIOS - they've actually got what I'd say is the fastest to navigate BIOS implementation out there although I haven't seen Asus or gigabytes x79 boards yet included is a little diagram of your board pointing out all the different late switches and slots and what you can do with them there's a couple things here that I would like to actually you know what I'm just going to leave this out and then we'll look at them on the board itself here is a multi GPU sli bridge here are your end connectors which allow you to easily plug in your front panel connectors as well as one of your USB headers here we have USB 3 back port IO shield with an internal USB 3 connector so you can add additional USB 3 ports to the back of your system if you don't have front USB 3 there's your i/o shield here is your drivers and utilities DVD go ahead and download the latest from the msi website here's a little msi quick installation guide showing you how to do some of the basics including hard drive installation cpu installation all that good stuff closely about SATA cable it's how many SATA cables do we get we get four say two three six gigabit per second cables and a couple of molex to SATA power adapters we also get one of these cool adapters so this is an eSATA 2 SATA cable a molex to dual SATA power cable and then two eSATA ports and a molex support so we can plug in two bare drives externally which is great for pulling data off drives when you don't have an enclosure handy software application user guides and finally a user guide for the board itself now let's pull out the board itself because we have gone through all of the accessories and look at that the board is the package is open where the i/o ports work this is a this is an engineering sample board so I don't expect the retail packaging to be pristine just so you guys know your board shouldn't come with holes on the i/o ports I can pretty much assure you of that so let's go ahead and check out the layout so first let's take off the sticker world's first PCI Express gen3 will throw that on there and this is an LGA 2011 socket so it requires not one but two lever arms there we go to pull it up or to rather rather to unlock it it's an enormous socket and then when you're putting it back down you're gonna go ahead and secure the CPU so this is the pin protector you'll remove that when you install your CPU and then you need to put this one in first and then this one in order to fully lock the CPU into the socket so here's our power delivery system going around the 2011 socket which is only compatible with LG 2011 processors not backwards compatible don't try and put a 1366 core i7 in there it's not gonna work here we have the 8d portion of this particular board it does support quad channel ddr3 up to 8 dims which means that if you're using 8 gig dims yes it can support up to 64 gigs of memory no big deal pretty outstanding so you're gonna want to populate all four blue slots or all four black slots that is the way the color coding is going to work when you are filling up these memory banks ok up here in the top left in its ideal location we have our 8 pin CPU connector and then moving over to the right it's so funny because this is usually where the vrm is and I see like 4 4 slots here and I want to say now we've got dual channel ddr3 Yap wrong wrong quad channel ddr3 ok so here we have our 24 pin power connector in its ideal location along the right-hand edge we have a multi Bible switch right here which allows you to switch between two physical BIOS chips for the ultimate in BIOS profiling and also to backup in the event of a corrupted BIOS very cool here on the side we have 4 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports so you have some flexibility there over here we have a post diagnostic le then we have a USB to front panel header with charging so this allows you this is a high-powered one which allows you to charge your iPad for example high-powered devices off of the front ports that this one's plugged into this is not the high-powered one we've also got USB 3 front panel and then what else we got here so we have actually we can check this out so here's your front panel connectors and then we've also got your voice genie connector fascinating so that looks like that's going to be a an optional add-on for this particular board because it didn't come with it we've also got our OC Genie button which is your one button overclocking built-in power button and built-in direct OC buttons so that is your your base clock adjustments that you can make with your physical buttons here front firewire auxiliary power for the five PCIe 6 pin connectors so if you do populate all those you're gonna want to plug that in and finally front panel audio so this board has the works on it in terms of the PCIe slot layout we've got one two three four five six total slots remember with all the space that these DIMMs are taking up it's a lot harder to put a slot here duh I mean look how long they are so you are stuck with six PCIe slots on most of the x79 boards that I've seen so far we've got one two three that are wired up for 16x connectivity and then this guy right here is wired up for 8x and this guy right here is also wired up for 8x this is a PCIe 1x slot so your ideal configuration on this board is going to be to go one two three cards in 3-way SLI or crossfire with a single additional slot left over for a sound card or a raid card or some other kind of card your night now if you install a full sized dual slot card in this bottom slot you're going to want to make sure that you have a case like the Corsair 800 d that has eight expansion slots so that you're going to have somewhere to secure that card and somewhere to exhaust the heat that is coming out the back of it now let's go ahead and have a look at the i/o ports on the back the board so we've got a ps2 port yes ps2 is here to stay it just keeps not going away we've got one two three four five six seven eight USB 2.0 ports a CMOS clear switch here optical audio out coaxial audio out fire wire as well as Gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.0 ports and 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the X 79 a GD 65 8 D this is the board that I am planning to use on my NCIX comm channel for our overclocking guide so stay tuned for that it's going to be exciting time