| MSI Z77A-GD65 LGA1155 Motherboard |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Saturday, 07 April 2012 | |
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Page 15 of 18
Intel Native USB 3.0More than two years after SuperSpeed USB 3.0 was announced at the 2010 Comdex, Intel finally has native support for this standard built into the Z77 Express chipset. While motherboard vendors have previously had to use NEC or Renesas controllers to get USB 3.0 capability, four native ports are now available without any extra chips. This simplifies the board layout and keeps costs down. USB 3.0 performance with storage devices has not proven as fast as you'd expect from the raw transfer rate defined in the USB 3.0 specification. Vendors like ASUS have applied their own tricks like "USB 3.0 Boost" to address this, but Intel says their native implementation will provide superior performance. I've previously tested ASUS' P9X79 WS motherboard with USB 3.0 with a Patriot Pyro SE SATA 6G SSD in a USB 3.0 dock, so I had those figures ready. I used the same AIDA64 disk benchmark to get read transfer rates for the MSI Z77A-GD65's USB 3.0, and the results are below-- the ASUS results are on the top and the MSI results are on the bottom. 
Looks as if Intel's right: their USB 3.0 implementation shows a huge performance improvement, over 70% faster in linear reads, at a trivial cost in CPU utilization. But there's more: check out Lucid Virtu MVP 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.