MSI Z77A-GD65 Motherboard

So I've been meaning to do this sooner but here we go. A brief overview of the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard. I won't be going too in depth as to absolutely everything thing on the board (with pictures anyway) but I will try to cover as much of the specifications as I can. First off, this is a Z77 chipset motherboard (which is the newest LGA1155 chipset revision as to this date). I have a personal preference towards MSI boards nowadays simply because I like their ease of access to overclocking, their UEFI interface on their BIOS, Winki (which is currently version 3 as of this article), their Military Class setup for all their components on their boards (uses solid capacitors, super ferrite chokes, highly conductive polymerized capacitors, and DrMOS), has PCI Express 3.0 on all their Z77 boards (has been available since their Z68A boards that were G3 labeled), and best of all, a CMOS reset button on the rear of the board. The CMOS reset isn't available on all of their boards unfortunately, but the Z77A-GD55, Z77A-GD65, Z77A-GD80, and Z77A-G45 (the Z77A version not the Z77MA version) all contain this button (which is located between the top USB/PS2 ports and the digital audio ports). I find this button useful because if you have a bad overclock and it doesn't get to the point where you can boot into the BIOS you can simply press this button with the system off and unplugged. Without having to open the case you have already reset the bios to defaults. Pretty handy I think. Some other manufacturers have also started putting this on their boards which is great, but I would still rather prefer MSI's other offerings. As for the Winki (currently version 3), if you're curious as to how it works or what it has for features, check out the dedicated page on MSI's website HERE. Now, onto the unboxing and overview.

The Z77A-GD65 box

MSI's boxes have always been very boasting of all the pictures of anything it comes with such as their Military Class III (which comes on this specific board), ClickBIOSII (which I will talk a little about but be also referencing a link to an alternate website which covers the BIOS screens a bit better than I can HERE) and OCGenie II (the OC stands for Overclock) which allows for 1 button press to mildly overclock your system with no effort from the end user. I don't usually resort to using this as sometimes it can be unstable but their more recent revisions of OCGenie seem to be a fair bit better in stability detection, but in the end I just like to go through and customize the settings as much as I can myself so that I get the most optimum overclock I can. The board supports all the LGA1155 socket CPUs to date (including the Ivy Bridge 22nm CPUs), nVidia SLi technology, AMD/ATi Crossfire technology, has VirtuMVP (which can help with boosting framerates), and uses PCI Express Gen 3 (3.0) ports for the three 16x PCI Express slots. To see more on everything it supports and a bit more in depth of an explanation of it's features, go to MSI's Z77A-GD65 webpage by clicking HERE.

The included accessories for the Z77A-GD65 board

The paperwork included with the Z77A-GD65 board

The SLi bridge comparison (new one on top and old on bottom)

The Z77A-GD65 board (which I will be referring to as GD65 the rest of this review) has quite a number of accessories it comes with. Inside the box on the top insert there is four SATA 90 degree to straight data cables, the I/O shield (which is painted black and looks great on the rear of a black painted case), a drivers and utilites CD (which also has the Winki software on it so you can boot straight to Winki through the disk without having to install it on the hard drive), a nVidia SLi Bridge, two MSI M-Connectors (similar to ASUS' Q-connector which allows you to simply take all the front panel I/O jumpers and plug them onto one modular jumper which plugs into the motherboard), and four voltage checkpoint connectors (which you plug into the board and use along with a multimeter to get a more accurate voltage reading. I would have liked to see two more SATA data cables to allow for all the Z77A chipset SATA board connectors to be filled, but that would affect the price of the board itself, so it's understandable. Another thing I would have liked to see is an included onboard speaker. Some cases nowadays don't seem to be coming with them so it would be nice to see the motherboard coming with the onboard speaker. The included SLI bridge is a lot nicer than the one that came with my Z68A board as MSI has now started making them black to go along with their color scheme now rather than being bronze and sticking out from the rest of the color scheme. Also in the top insert it has the motherboard manual (which is a lengthy black and white booklet which explains almost everything on the board that you would need to know), a simple overclocking guide (which is in color), a quick installation guide (in black and white), a software and application user guide, and lastly a MSI Military Class III certificate simply stating that the board is up to MIL-STD-810G specifications in terms of the parts used and help with stability of the board. The MIL-STD-810G testings are also listed on the same certificate.

The MSI Z77A-GD65 with tons of stickers all over the board

The stickers off of the Z77A-GD65 board

The orange SATA sticker

The blue PCI Express Gen 3 sticker

Underneath the top insert of the GD65 box is the motherboard itself, wrapped in a plastic anti-static bag. Taking it out of the bag, one notices all the stickers MSI has placed everywhere on the board explaining once again the main features to buy MSI, Military Class III, OCGenie II, and PCI Express 3.0. There are also two other stickers on the board, one over the third PCI Express 3.0 slot, and one over the SATA ports. The one over the PCI Express 3.0 slot explains that in order to have proper functionality of the third slot you would need to use an Ivy Bridge (or 3rd Generation) Intel CPU. The sticker on the SATA ports explains that you should plug you SSDs (Solid State Drive) into the native 6Gb/s ports (the two white ones nearest the RAM) to have the best performance available.

The Z77A-GD65 board with the stickers peeled off

The location of the CMOS battery (between the first and second PCIE 3.0 slots

Taking all of the stickers off of the GD65, you are left with a very nice color scheme of black, silver and blue for the overall scheme on the board. The board has a 24-pin ATX connector as well as a 8-pin CPU connector (instead of a 4-pin connector) to allow for maximum voltage input for CPU stability. The board comes with three PCI Express 3.0 (16x style) slots as well as four PCI Express 1x slots. In between the first and second PCIE 3.0 slots is the CMOS battery. I would have preferred this to be in the lower right corner of the board for easy access, but as the board has the handy CMOS reset button on the back of the board, this can be overlooked unless you really need to change the battery (which shouldn't be necessary as the board hardly uses any of the battery for almost all of the life of the board itself). The board also has MSI's Easy Button 3 (located in the upper right of the board along with the OC Genie II button). I would have preferred if the buttons were more near the middle of the board, but the Easy Button 3 buttons are only really utilized if the board is set up on a test bench rather than being inside of a rig. Regardless, it's nice that they are included for troubleshooting if your rig's power or reset buttons are having issues. The board also is equipped with four 6Gb/s SATA ports (two through the Z77 chipset and two through an ASMedia chip which does not support RAID), four 3Gb/s SATA ports (all through the Z77 chipset), five fan headers (of which three are PWM headers that are monitored and adjustable in the BIOS), a USB 3.0 header (located just above the SATA ports), three USB 2.0 headers (the red colored one is used for the Super Charger feature included with this board so if you wish to utilize that feature for your front USB 2.0 ports, assuming the case has 2.0 front ports, you would want to plug the header in there), a firewire header (not really used too often nowadays), a front panel audio header, MSI's multi-BIOS (which there are two BIOS chips installed onto the board so that if the main BIOS chip fails for whatever reason, you can switch to the backup), a POST diagnostics display directly to the left of the multi-BIOS chips(which is really handy if you have no video output and don't know why your system isn't booting), and TPM header support (a module that is used to encrypt data on your system). There are also several other board specific jumpers, but they are not really important (they are explained in the manual so if you are curious check the manual for more information). Underneath the blue and black heat-sink to the right of the expansion slots is the Z77 chipset. This is the newest chipset (as of August 2012) Intel has released for the LGA1155 socket which is compatible with all generation CPUs of the LGA1155 socket.

A picture of the RAM slot area and what is to the right of it

Most blue colored heat-sink RAM looks excellent in MSI boards as well as black colored ones as well (or if you want you can get some Corsair RAM in both a set of blue and a set of black as well to go in the corresponding colored slots which also sometimes looks sharp). Another thing about the RAM slots is that MSI states in the manual that in order to have best performance if only using two DDR3 sticks that you should install them into the black slots rather than the blue ones for maximum stability while achieving dual channel performance. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but if the manufacturer reports that it works better this way, then might as well do as they ask. To the right of the RAM slots are the voltage checkpoints, a fan header, some more SFC chokes, the onboard power and reset buttons (labeled Easy Button 3) as well as the OC Genie II button (which if pressed will give your system a basic overclock).

The CPU area on the Z77A-GD65 board

Around the CPU there are eleven SFC chokes which are attached to the power phases on the motherboard and covered by two large blue and black heat-sinks with a heatpipe connecting them. There is also another SFC choke located underneath the second PCI Express 3.0 slot on the GD65. It uses an 8+2+1+1 power phase configuration. Eight are used for the CPU main voltage (aka VCore), two for the CPU VSA (memory controller) voltage, one for the CPU VTT voltage (used for the PCI Express and DMI interfaces), and lastly one for the CPU integrated video controller. When it comes to stability of the system during overclocking, the more phases available the more stable the system should be. I say should because if you're pushing the system too hard, it doesn't matter how many phases you have if the hardware can't run under those conditions.

The rear I/O port on the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard

On the rear I/O panel we have four USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port (which you can plug up a legacy mouse or keyboard), the CMOS reset button (which I talked about earlier), optical and coaxial digital out ports, an HDMI port (which is only utilized if using the onboard graphics),  two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit ethernet port, VGA and DVI video ports, and 7.1 surround sound ports. I unfortunately didn't have enough time to go and take a picture of the rear I/O myself as I was in a rush to build the system so that is why I have used the picture from MSI's website.

As I said, I will discuss a bit on the BIOS on my blog, but if you want to see some screens of the UEFI BIOS please visit the review from Tweaktown HERE. One thing I would recommend is that when you receive the GD65 is to update the BIOS to the newest revision as it is a lot more stable than the one out of the box and has some tweaks to the BIOS such as how some of the numbers are inputted as well as different available values for some other overclocking settings. Overall I like the setup of the UEFI BIOS available by MSI as it's clean but concise and allows for easy tweaking of nearly anything to do with the board itself. For overclocking, things you want to make sure to adjust is you want to disable EUP2013, disable EIST, disable any spread spectrums available in the BIOS, disable Intel C-State, disable C1E, disable Overspeed Protection, set Internal PLL Overvoltage to enabled, make sure Turbo Boost is disabled, set the RAM frequency to whatever your RAM is rated at (standard is usually 1333 or 1600), and then start adjusting voltages and multipliers. It's best to start off smaller, usually with LGA1155 socket CPU's you can start at 4.0Ghz with all the voltages set to auto and then after that you may need to adjust either normal voltages or PLL voltages.

Other than that, I can't think of much else to talk about for the MSI Z77A-GD65 board. Would I buy it again? For it's price it's definitely got a lot of good features and I like MSI's Military Class specifications used on their board. However, if I was on more of a tight budget I may end up with another brand such as a Gigabyte or a Biostar board simply because they are pretty good value boards, but whenever I can I like to stick with MSI simply because I know they have been reliable whenever I've owned one. So to answer that question, definitely would consider buying again. If there's any other questions on the board, feel free to ask and I will try to answer best I can.

Next post will be the process of me putting together the Oh Baby! rig in it's entirety as well as quick overviews on some of the hardware used.