MSI Z68A-GD80 motherboard review

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MSI Z68A-GD80

A nice perspective view. Notable is (to the left, in the middle) the new USB 3.0 motherboard connector. Connect the supplied USB 3.0 bracket and you gain another two USB 3.0 ports.

MSI Z68A-GD80

To the lower right you can see a black block with a red inner color, that is in fact what MSI calls a 'Super Charger'. 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. iCharger however will be software dependant and must be used in collaboration with iCharger Super Charger software.
Sitting here to the left are three 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. The automated overclock is actually pretty significant as enabling the OC Genie resulted into a clock frequency of 4200 MHz on our Core i7 2500K/2600K processor.

Audio is handled by Realtek's 892 codec allowing 8 channels of audio, pretty much the standard norm these days on motherboards. We would like to see some more development done on the audio side of motherboards. Added is a X-Fi software layer that allows EAX5 though.

MSI Z68A-GD80

Very eye catching is of course the overall design. We can see that a bit better on this photo where MSI uses grey/blue heatsinks.

Slot connectivity wise you'll spot three PCI Express x16 slots. However, the slots are limited as the motherboard needs way more PCie lanes to become fully operational, here's the breakdown:

PCIE 1 - supports up to x16 speed when PCI 2 and 3 are empty
PCIE 2 - supports up to x8 speed
PCIE 3 - supports up to x4 speed

So yeah, the board has many features and hosts other unusual features alongside the UEFI (GUI BIOS), which MSI labels 'Click BIOS interface'.

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