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When we place the motherboard in an angle we see the socket LGA1155. It will support both ivy Bridge as well as Sandy bridge processors. The board has an 8-pin power header for the processor . To the lower corner there are 9 LEDs. The topmost LED is the DrMos alarm while the other eight LEDs indicate the number of phases that the CPU is currently using.

At the edge of the MSI Z77A-GD65 we see the a internal IEEE1394a (Firewire) header, front panel headers, Voice Genie connector (JDLED3), Trusted Platform Module, a 3pin system fan header, and the internal header for the front panel audio.

If we zoom in at the lower right corner we spot Easy Button 3.  It has one OC Genie II button and then a power and reset button. Just under the 24pin motherboard power connector you can spot V-Check points, handy if you like to monitor VCCP, CPU VTT, CPU Graphics, DDR VCC, and the PCH 1P05 voltages with a digital multimeter. Above it you'll spot 4 DIMM slots with support up to 32GB of memory running at 2667MHz.

SATA ports then -- MSI is equipping the Z77A-GD65 with eight SATA ports. The white SATA ports to the right are SATA III 6Gbps which are native to the Intel Z77 chipset. In the middle you'll see four black SATA II 3Gbps ports. The remaining two SATA ports to the left are SATA III 6Gbps based on an ASMedia ASM1061 chip.

That's it for this tiny little preview. We are not allowed to show any performance results or in-depth matters of the Z77 chipset. We hope you liked this little preview.

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