Gadgetory

alright guys this is an exciting motherboard for a couple of different reasons number one it is made by MSI whoops here number two it has a three year warranty number three it features military class two with solid ferrite chokes high-seat caps with tantalum cores and solid caps for the 10 year lifetime number three they have added a Better Business Bureau accredited business sticker to the outside of the box so apparently MSI is a Better Business Bureau accredited business this is something I did not know number one two three four number five it features the world's first PCI Express gen3 support so that means with a supported CPU you have support for it double the bandwidth of PCI Express Gen 2 okay so that means that a PCIe 3/8 X slot has the same bandwidth as a PCIe to 16 X slot cool huh okay also click BIOS 2 has been implemented on this board so click BIOS refer to MSI's UEFI Mouse BIOS interface it has been completely reworked and now it is click BIOS tooth so hopefully I'll have a chance to check that out on this particular board in the near future this is a certified military standard board so that's with their military class components and actually this isn't even right this board has a 5 year warranty this sticker is wrong this is an eval unit from early on it's possible the decision for 5 year warranty hadn't been made yet but no this is a 5 year warranty board along with the GD 80s so what MSI has decided to do with this particular military standard board is stand behind it for an even longer period of time than they normally do I've got a couple other cool features you got your instant OC and the msi control center software we've got the supercharger which allows you to charge an iPad so even a larger device at high speed even when your PC is shut down and then we've also got wink III which allows you to boot up into a pre Windows OS within the BIOS and do basic things like browser the Internet should you so desire all right we've got a drivers and utilities DVD a quick installation guide in black and white we have a top quality and stability software application user guide in color on the other side and black and white on the inside which is just fine all right we have a rear panel USB three header so I can plug that into the on-board header and I can have a couple extra USB 3 ports if I don't have front USB three on my case we have an i/o shield we have the end connectors which allows me to easily plug in my front panel connectors without fighting with the individual little pins against the board we also have a look at that we've got that V check so this board does feature V check which allows you to check the voltage directly using a multimeter rather than relying on software based tools we've got four SATA cables they are all straight to right angles and then we have a molex to SATA adapter I've actually used that on a number of occasions for the top optical drive sometimes if you don't want a fee to say that cable all the way up there we've also got a mainboard user guide here and finally an SLI cable so let's have a look at the board itself and talk about some of the other features that are applicable to this board because this is a z68 for it so besides being upgraded with support for PCI Express 3.0 it has some cool features all right z68 board so what that means is you know what let's start with you know what let's do the general board layout and then we'll and then we'll get into the z68 features so we've got our CPU socket which is an LGA 1155 socket right here in the middle of the board around that we have what's actually a fairly beefy looking power delivery system you can see the tantalum core components around the CPU itself and we've also got a thick no that's on that note that's a standard size heat pipe connecting the cooling for the top of our vrm and the side vrm all around the CPU socket so we've got support for core i3 s Core i5 and core i7 CPUs and then we've got our power up here so we've got eight pin power connector in its ideal location along the top left of the board we have four DDR 3 slots supporting dual channel operation we have our V check points this is a great feature because it allows you to get actually accurate voltage readouts on the we've got two grounds ok so we've got the PCH VCC DDR CPU GFX CPU VT t and VCC P so all those settings will mean something to you if you're the kind of person who actually needs to measure them alright finally we've got the or not finally you've got the OC Genie button so that's your OneTouch overclocking our 24 pin connectors and it's ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board and we've got some more fan connectors all summarized the fan headers after we've got plenty of SATA ports so we've got hmm 4 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and 2 SATA our and 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports although right now it's hard for me to tell you guys it looks like these two are running off the Intel chipset 4 6 gig per second ports and these two are probably running off this Marvell chip site right here but it's hard to say a hundred percent let me just see if I can see where those traces are going yeah yeah that's what it looks like it looks like those two are running off the Marvell chipset so moving down we've got a couple of front USB headers here this one with red behind it that's the one that supports the additional power we've got our USB a 3.0 header right here and then we've got built-in reset and power switches here and finally our front audio header here I always like to see motherboards with the maximum number of expansion slots because that does give you more options especially if you are installing two dual slot graphics cards so right here we have three PCIe 1x slots two PCIe 16x slots and two PCI slots so if you were to install two dual slot cards you're going to be left with a single PCI and two PCIe 1x which I feel is a good mix given the state of expansion cards right now you might have some legacy PCI card but anything new you're buying you're probably going to get a PCI Express version so let's go over how many fan headers there are on this guy so we've got one for pin PWM here one for pin Pete um here two three pins here and the three pin here in the middle so that's a total of five on this motherboard moving around to the back of the board we have one two three four USB 2.0 ports one of those ps2 keyboard mouse combo ports a clear CMOS button I love the clear CMOS button on the back big fan okay we have optical as well as PO axial audio out HDMI out DVI out and VGA out giving you an option for what you want to use if you do use the onboard video USB three Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio so this onboard audio brings us to one of the features and that is virtue by lucid is a soft so that's a software that's licensed by Intel for use on this particular platform which allows you to use Intel Quick Sync technology which is built into the onboard GPU in your CPU the onboard GPU your CPU the graphics that are built on to your CPU but use your dedicated graphics card for gaming and it will actually help you switch dynamically between those two different components when you're doing tasks that are optimized for them okay the other feature that is unique to the Zed 68 platform is the ability to use Intel SRT or Super Smart Response technology which enables you to use a boot hard drive such as a one terabyte Western Digital black or blue for example and remember don't use a green for boot because it's not optimized for that and then take an SSD of 60 gigs or smaller capacity and use it as a cache for your big hard drive in order to get up to a four times performance increase in real world applications and it does work by the way in case you guys are wondering this board is fully SLI and crossfire ready which is something I haven't mentioned before and I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the world's first PCI Express 3.0 ready motherboard the z68 a GD 65 well it's actually the world's second BAM first because the GD 80 supports the same thing remember to watch out for the g3 and the part number in order to make sure that it does support Gen 3 PCIe graphics and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos