MSI Z68A GD65 G3 Review

Up Close continued

Starting off round the back we have four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0, VGA, DVI, HDMI, LAN and the audio headers. Across the silicon expanse we have four SATA 2 ports and four SATA 3 ones to cover all your storage requirements. Two of these run off the excellent Marvell 9128 controller and the other six off the Z68 chipset itself.

      

As well as the obvious 4 DIMM sockets this board comes equipped with the brilliant Genie II overclocking button. With the board off you press the button and start up and it overclocks your processor for you. It’s easily the best auto-overclocking solution on the market and a previous winner of our Innovation Award.

Although the front panel connections aren’t marked on the board the header (as part of the accessories on the previous page) is. Just above that is the Fintek Super IO chip.

      

This is the major talking point of the Z68A GD65 G3, a full fat PCI Express 3 socket. MSI have gone away and created their own PCIe Gen3 switches to make certain that the full bandwidth is available to you. We’ll find out if there are any benefits ‘right now’ later on, but for future cards these switches are a big deal.