The Box, The Accessories, The Board
The last board I reviewed, the Asrock X79 Professional had what felt like the largest box possible. On the other hand MSI has gone with a smaller box size which is quite welcomed. All over the box you get to read about the super cool features included on this board. I found it interesting that MSI included a sticker noting that they are a BBB(Better Business Bureau) accredited business, I for one would rather see some information on the outside of the box indicating warranty length.. Opening up the box you get some nice goodies such as SATA cables, an I/O shield, SLI cables, various manuals, a driver DVD, a backpanel eSATA connector and a USB 3.0 adapter.
Moving on to the board itself, I have to say its a nice looking motherboard with the blue/ black scheme. This board is not loaded with gaudy looking heatsinks, but has voltage read points and overclocking buttons on the board so you know it means business.
Lets start with the socket area. It is kind of messy, so if you are an extreme cooler looking to insulate the socket area keep in mind that it will take a chunk of work to insulate it properly with the various components around the socket. Mounting a waterblock was no problem at all, but keep in mind that if you have tall memory and a very large heatsink you will have issues. The ram slots are a tiny bit too close for my linking, but they should be fine as long as you do not have a giant heatsink like the Noctua NH-D14.
Installing and uninstalling video cards was a breeze with the X79-GD65. The clips used make removing a card easy enough. The lack of a “Northbridge” heatsink means you will not have problems removing a video card, much in the way that certain other companies install one even if there is no actual northbridge there which can make unclipping the card a downright pain in the butt.
Speaking of the PCI-E slots, there are five of them. But at most you can only run three-way Crossfire or SLI. The rest can be filled with sound cards, RAID cards or whatever else you want to slap in there.
This board is built for overclockers. I really like the fact that you get a debug display, voltage read points and to top it off there is also physical buttons to adjust base clock on the board.
The GD65 also includes eight SATA ports, four of which are SATA-6. While this is not quite as many as other boards in its price range it is still more than enough for the great majority of people.
