MSI's more affordable entry for the X79
chipset market looks great and performs great
Not content with releasing something that
is catered to just the high-end consumer market,
MSI has launched another motherboard that
is centred towards those who want to have a high performance setup without
having to spend too much money (we're saying this liberally, of course) on the
components. To that end, MSI has, for you, the X79A-GD65 8D.
An oddly named motherboard, you may say,
but the GD65 8D is certainly one of the most professional looking boards we've
seen come from MSI. Clad in black and blue, the peripheral layout for the DG65
8D certainly is impressive. Now we're not really certain about this but we did
some research and found out that the 8D stands for the 8 DIMM slots that occupy
the sides of the processor that supports up to 64GBs of RAM, be it 1,066,
1,333, 1,600, 2,133 or 2,400 MHZ variants. It also supports single, dual and
quad memory modes depending on the number of RAM sticks that you use.
The GD65 8D also comes with eight SATA
ports, four of which are SATA II 3Gbps (in white) and the rest being SATA III
6Gbps (in black). As for graphics, the GD65 8D has five PCIe x16 slots, three
of which are PCIe 3.0 and the other two PCIe 2.0. Capable of three-way SLI or
CrossFireX, the choice is yours in this regard as to which path you want to
take to build your ultimate gaming rig.
At the back, MSI were gracious to fit in a
whopping ten USB ports, eight of which are USB 2.0, while the other two are USB
3.0. As a standard these days, there is also a PS/2 port for gamers who prefer
the lower latency of the last gen port, a clear CMOS button, an optical S/PDIF
and coaxial audio output port. Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet and high definition
audio ports that support up to 7.1 audio systems.
We ran some overclocking tests and managed
to get the processor to be overclocked up to 4.2GFIz on air without having to
dabble much with the voltage settings. Of course, with the proper cooling setup
and voltage settings it is possible to get this monster to overclock the
processor up to 5GHz. Not too shabby if you have the extra dough to cough up
for a decent cooling system.
MSI X79A-GD65 8D
Price $ 395
Specifications
Platform: Intel 2011
Form Factor: ATX
Chipset: X79
Memory type: DDR3
Ratings
Performance 4 stars
Features 4 stars
Design 4 stars
Value 4 stars
