Gadgetory

so today we'll be doing a quick unboxing of the msi z68 a GD atv-3 motherboard so the z68 a GD 8 eb 3 motherboard features their military class 2 concept which means they have the Superferry chokes the hi-c caps with the tantalum core which is very rare evidently you have solid caps with up to a 10 year lifetime of solid use as well as their OC Genie technology USB 3 SATA 6 SLI crossfire X and full support for intel's full lineup of Intel Core i3 i5 i7 processors on LGA 1155 it features a three-year warranty in Canada and the US and in other regions I have no idea so here there's just a little bit more explanation of what military class 2 means as well as a list of their features including their wink III which is like a quick OS you can login to in the BIOS if you want to browse the internet or phone Skype or load windows for whatever reason super charger so you can charge your iPad iPhone and mobile at high speed even when your PC is shut down that's a cool feature as well as their instant overclocking which is obviously tied in to OC Genie which is their one button overclocking press the button your overclocked remember OC Genie only works with K series processors though okay three PCI Express 16x slots for up to three way crossfire or two-way SLI and finally overclock in one second OC Genie - yes so others detect overclock CPU memory oh and the integrated GPU now remember with the z68 chipset the integrated GPU clock speed is actually going to matter even if you're using a dedicated graphics card and the reason for that is that the z68 chipset allows you to use the integrated GPU to accelerate video encoding so that's pretty cool so that will affect that performance okay here we have extreme power design so twelve phases we have dr. Moss as well as an extra six pin VGA power connector for providing more power to the PCIe slots we have two BIOS chips just in case one of them has some kind of a problem maybe during flashing or whatever the case may be you will have no problem restoring from the second BIOS chip let me just pull the board out see we've got some nice environmentally friendly packaging going on here I'm just gonna move that supercharger okay so the supercharger USB ports are month you know I'll show you the accessories first when it'll go through the other features so here is a little map of the board and as well as some key points about the board that you can find on the box if you so desired drivers and utilities DVD throat away download the latest off the msi website you've got m connectors which are an easier way to plug in your front USB and front panel connectors quick installation guide one two three four SATA three six gigabit per second cables which are not different except that they are white and then you have two molex to SATA power cables IO shield V chat cables so this board features V check which means that you can use a digital multimeter to manually check the voltages going some of the key components we have an SLI bridge remember your crossfire bridge should be included with your graphics card USB three rear panel header with an internal internal pin out okay just in case your case doesn't have extra five front USB three and you still want to use the extra ports so you've got a user guide as well as a software user guide alright the board itself now we are so military class to sticker comes off and oh this is interesting looks like they've changed the they've changed the socket cover from what they were using before which was a piece that goes under so I don't even know how this one works like that there okay that's how first take off our OC Genie two things and let's have a look at the board so why don't we start in the CPU socket area so here's where your LGA 1155 CPU goes that will give you full support as I said before for core i3 Core i5 and core i7 processors here's your 12 phase power design as well as your tantalum core little guys here so that's part of the military class 2 concept which is prominently featured on the branding on the board we've got our 8 pin CPU connector up here in its ideal location in the top left corner big fan of that personally as well as for ddr3 slots for dual channel memory we've got our 24-pin connector and it's ideal location along the right-hand edge as well as V checkpoints here so we have checkpoints for the VC CP CP u v TT CPU GFX so that's the onboard VGA VCC DDR as well as PCH what is that PCH 1 p0 v interesting as well as 2 ground points alright moving down we have two SATA 3 6 gigabit router hold on hold on just a minute SATA 5 6 so that's before yeah Tuesday 3 6 gigabit per second for SATA 2 3 gigabit per second then we have an additional SATA 3 6 gigabit per second running off of a third-party controller alright here are our front USB ports this is the one with supercharged the one with the red background behind it I don't know if you can see that red background can you okay and then we've also got our USB 3 front panel header OC Genie button power reset another oh no this is firewire front panel header our front audio as well as our PCIe slots so PCIe slot layout we've got one two three PCIe 16x slots we have two PCIe 1x slots and two PCI slots so if you are installing three dual slot cards you will have left now you've got to make sure you have a case that has an additional PCI slot because it's going to hang over the edge but you will be left with one PCIe 1x slot and one PCI slot so that's very rich expansion capabilities if you're running a threeway graphics card configuration if you're running a two-way graphics card configuration you're gonna be left with one PCIe one one PCI and one PCIe 16 here's that PCI Express 6 pin power connector right here so if you are running a few graphics cards you're probably gonna want to plug that in to make sure that you're providing all the juice you need to your graphics cards here on the back the i/o shield we have one of those ps2 keyboard mouse combo ports we have optical audio out a reset CMOS which I love the reset seamless switch on the back I owe that big fan of that ok we have one two three four really four USB 2.0 ports that's it ok 4 USB 2.0 ports we have eSATA firewire dual Gigabit Ethernet two USB 3.0 ports so that is still a total of six USB ports we have DVI out as well as HDMI out and 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the z68 a GD atv-3 and let me just see if there's anything that I missed here I don't think there is don't forget subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos