MSI Z68A GD80 G3 PCIe Gen 3.0 motherboard review - Product Showcase

When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. Very spacious, you should have no issues with most heatsinks. Other than that, fairly clean looks surround the LGA 1155 socket alright. The board comes with 12-phase power design.

We spot one 8-pin CPU power header; and close to the first blue colored PCIe x16 slot you'll notice a 6-pin PEG power header. MSI claims that it will feed the graphics card installed and helps out overclocking and tweaking graphics memory.

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 4 x DIMM support with a maximum of 32 GB and supports four unbuffered DIMM at 1.5 Volt DDR3 1066/1333/1600*/2133*(OC) DRAM, 32GB Max

• Supports 1GB/ 2GB/ 4GB/ 8GB DRAM size
• Supports Dual channel mode

Overall board design is just great. Everything is positioned really well. Zoomed in to the right we spot so-called V-Check Point, where you can check CPU, VTT, PCH and DRAM voltages with a Digital Multi Meter against what you configure or assign voltage wise on that segment of the motherboard.

Let's move onwards to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors, let's zoom in a little.

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 see two additional SATA 3 (6 GBit) ports, and then all the way to the left in white another SATA 6G connector which leads to one eSATA combo ports on the I/O panel.