| MSI Z77A-GD65 LGA1155 Motherboard |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Saturday, 07 April 2012 | |
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MSI Z77A-GD65 LGA1155 Motherboard Review
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International (MSI) Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by MSI. It's getting hard to keep track of all the Intel chipsets out there, and Intel adds another 10 new chipsets to accompany Ivy Bridge: HM77, UM77, HM76, and HM75 comprise the mobile chipset line, while the Z77, Z75, H77, Q77, Q75, and B75 fill out the desktop line. As you might expect from the model number, the MSI Z77A-GD65 uses the Z77 chipset. While the main reason for the existence of the Z77 Express is the forthcoming "3rd Generation Intel Core Processor" (whose name we are prohibited from mentioning in this article), existing Z68 motherboards will also support this new CPU family with a simple BIOS update, which many manufacturers have already made available.
Since there are some very nice Z68 motherboards out there, and they'll run your spiffy new "3rd Generation Intel Core Processor", what does the Z77 chipset have that the Z68 doesn't? Let's take a look in the next section.
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Comments
I try OC but when Windows starts up, my computer just stops in the loading Screen for windows....
Same if i use OC-genie
And sometimes it appear a2 in right bottom corner on the screen (rest is black)
My computer specs:
I7-3770K Intel prosessor
MSI z77a-gd65 motherboard
H100 cpu cooling (corsair)
12GB ram Dominator GT / ram fan (corsair)
MSI hd r6800 series HAWK
And i got a H2Go case from MountainMods.com
Im crossing my fingers :P
1. This is true of ANY Z67/Z68/Z77 motherboard except high-end boards with PLX chips. You've only got 16 PCI-E lanes from the CPU, so provisioning 2 x16 slots is impossible without extra hardware.
2. If you're using an Ivy Bridge chip, you've got PCI-E 3.0 lanes with twice the bandwidth as PCI-E 2.0 lanes, so those two x8 slots are the equivalent of two x16 slots if you're using a PCI-E 3.0 compliant graphics card.
3. But even if you're running Sandy Bridge CPU and older graphics cards, guess what? Nothing out there saturates 8 PCI-E lanes anyway, so games won't play one FPS slower on a 2x8 SLI or Crossfire system than they would on a 2x16 system.
But if you want to spend extra money, yes, there are many LGA1155 motherboard that can supply 2x16: ASUS Maximum V Extreme, ASUS P8Z77-WS, ASUS P8Z77-V Premium; EVGA Z77 FTW. MSI doesn't seem to have any boards like this, but again, unless you're running triple or quad cards, you don't really need a board with a PLX chip.