Product Showcase MSI X79A GD65

Sitting here in the middle are four buttons, power on/off, reset and MSI's OC Genie II that allows users to overclock the CPU by simply hitting a button placed on the motherboard itself; it takes merely a few seconds. Pressing it resulted into a full 3.8 GHz clock frequency. Newly added are Direct OC dials, which allow you to increase the processor clock frequency on the fly. All the way to the right you can see a blue connector for USB 3.0 extensions.

Check out the PCIe slot connectivity, that's five x16 slots and one x1 slot. Gen 3 compatibility is there as far as this motherboard goes. In x16:x16:x8 even three way SLI could be supported. Or what about dual-graphics cards and then an x8 for a Physx card?

In the lower back corner we spot a POST LED, it will display status codes of the system while booting. If your memory fails you could identify it with the help the error code. Once booted into windows it will display your processors temperature.

So for this review we use four GSKILL DDR3 2100 MHz DIMMs for quad-channel compatibility, next to that we use the MaxRevo 1350W PSU from Enermax as we want to overclock this setup a little ;)

We also used a Corsair H100 LCS cooling kit to chill down the CPU, not the Intel reference cooler as we have been testing the processor, before the final LCS kit arrived.