Product Showcase MSI X79A GD65

Mind you that socket LGA 2011 requires a new retention mechanism, meaning you either need to upgrade the CPU cooler brackets, purchase a compatible cooler or alternatively go with the liquid cooled SKU Intel releases opposed to a tray CPU. We spot one 8-pin CPU power header.

Components wise we only see quality really, solid capacitors, ferrite core chokes, quality components and nothing else. This is based on MSI's military class component selection which ensures stability but also reliability and extended lifespan.

There is 8 x DIMM support for a maximum of 64 GB, and support for unbuffered DIMMs at 1.5 Volts, DDR3 1066/1333/1600*/2133*/2400*(OC) DRAM. So it would support 1GB/ 2GB/ 4GB/ 8GB DRAM sizes. Obviously, depending on the number of DIMMS in use, you get support for Single, Dual-channel and Quad-channel (four DIMMS) mode.

Let's move onwards to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors. The motherboard features four black right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10. In addition to the regular SATA II ports, colored in white, we see four additional SATA 3 (6 GBit) ports, two of these come from Intel, the other two are ASMedia 1061 based (these perform a little less opposed to the native Intel 6G controllers as we'll demonstrate).

To the lower right you can see a black block with a red inner color, that is in fact a  USB pin header which you can use to connect say an iPAD or iPHONE to. It will detect voltage requirement and apply the appropriate voltage.