 Alright guys, this is an exciting motherboard for a couple of different reasons. Number one, it is made by MSI. Number two, it has a three year warranty. Number three, it features military class 2 with solid ferrite chokes, high seat caps with Tandalum cores, and solid caps with a ten year lifetime. Number three, they have added a Better Business Bureau accredited business sticker to the outside of the box. So apparently MSI is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. This is something I did not know. Number one, two, three, four, number five, it features the world's first PCI Express Gen 3 support. So that means with a supported CPU, you have support for double the bandwidth of PCI Express Gen 2. Okay, so that means that a PCIe3 8x slot has the same bandwidth as a PCIe2 16x slot. Cool huh? Okay, also, ClickBIOS 2 has been implemented on this board. So ClickBIOS, referred to MSI's UEFI mouse BIOS interface, it has been completely reworked and now it is ClickBIOS 2. So hopefully I'll have a chance to check that out on this particular board in the near future. This is a certified military standard board, so that's with their military class components and actually, this isn't even right. This board has a five year warranty. This sticker is wrong. This is an eval unit from early on. It's possible the decision for a five year warranty hadn't been made yet, but no, this is a five year warranty board along with the GD80. So what MSI has decided to do with this particular military standard board is stand behind it for an even longer period of time than they normally do. Got a couple other cool features. You got your instant OC in the MSI Control Center software. We've got the supercharger, which allows you to charge an iPad, so even a larger device at high speed, even when your PC is shut down. And then we've also got Winky 3, which allows you to boot up into a pre-Windows OS within the BIOS and do basic things like browsing the internet, should you so desire. All right, we've got a drivers and utilities DVD, a quick installation guide in black and white. We have a top quality and stability software application user guide in color on the outside and black and white on the inside, which is just fine. All right, we have a rear panel USB 3 header, so I can plug that into the onboard header and I can have a couple extra USB 3 ports if I don't have front USB 3 on my case. We have an IO shield. We have the M connectors, which allows me to easily plug in my front panel connectors without fighting with the individual little pins against the board. We also have, oh, look at that, we've got a V-check. So this board does feature V-check, which allows you to check the voltage directly using a multimeter rather than relying on software-based tools. We've got four SATA cables, they are all straight to right angle, and then we have a Molex to SATA adapter. I've actually used that on a number of occasions for the top optical drives sometimes if you don't want to feed a SATA cable all the way up there. We've also got a main board user guide here. And finally, an SLI cable. So let's have a look at the board itself and talk about some of the other features that are applicable to this board because this is a Z68 board. So besides being upgraded with support for PCI Express 3.0, it has some cool features. All right, Z68 board. So what that means is, you know what, let's start with, you know what, let's do the general board layout and then we'll get into the Z68 feature. So we've got our CPU socket, which is an LGA1155 socket right here in the middle of the board. Around that we have what's actually a fairly beefy looking power delivery system. You can see the tantalum core components around the CPU itself. And we've also got a thick, no, that's a, okay, nope, that's a standard size heat pipe connecting the cooling for the top of our VRM and the side VRM all around the CPU socket. So we've got support for Core i3s, Core i5s, and Core i7 CPUs. And then we've got our power up here. So we've got an 8-pin power connector in its ideal location along the top left of the board. We have four DDR3 slots supporting dual channel operation. We have our V checkpoints. This is a great feature because it allows you to get actually accurate voltage readouts on the, we've got two grounds. Okay, so we've got the PCH, VCC, DDR, CPU, GFX, CPU VTT, and VCCP. So all those settings will mean something to you if you're the kind of person who actually needs to measure them. Alright, finally we've got the, or not finally, we've got the OC Genie button, so that's your one touch overclocking. Our 24-pin connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board. And we've got some more fan connectors. I'll summarize the fan headers after. We've got plenty of SATA ports. So we've got four SATA3 6 gigabit per second ports, and four SATA2 3 gigabit per second ports. Although right now it's hard for me to tell you guys. It looks like these two are running off the Intel chipset for 6 gig per second ports, and these two are probably running off this Marvell chipset right here, but it's hard to say 100%. Let me just see if I can see where those traces are going. Yeah, yeah, that's what it looks like. It looks like those two are running off the Marvell chipset. So moving down, we've got a couple of front USB headers. Here this one with red behind it, that's the one that supports the additional power. We've got our USB 3.0 header right here, and then we've got built-in reset and power switches here, and finally our front audio header here. I always like to see motherboards with the maximum number of expansion slots, because that does give you more options, especially if you are installing two dual slot graphics cards. So here we have three PCIe 1x slots, two PCIe 16x slots, and two PCI slots. So if you were to install two dual slot cards, you're going to be left with a single PCI and two PCIe 1x, which I feel is a good mix given the state of expansion cards right now. You might have some legacy PCI card, but anything new you're buying, you're probably going to get a PCI Express version. So let's go over how many fan headers there are on this guy. So we've got one 4-pin PWM here, one 4-pin PWM here, two 3-pins here, and a 3-pin here in the middle. So that's a total of five on this motherboard. Moving around to the back of the board, we have one, two, three, four USB 2.0 ports, one of those PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports, a clear CMOS button. I love the clear CMOS button on the back. Big fan. Okay, we have optical as well as coaxial audio out. HDMI out, DVI out, and BGA out, giving you an option for what you want to use if you do use the onboard video. USB 3, gigabit ethernet, and 7.1 audio. So this onboard audio brings us to one of the features, and that is Virtue by Lucid. So that's a software that's licensed by Intel for use on this particular platform, which allows you to use Intel QuickSync technology, which is built into the onboard GPU and your CPU, the onboard GPU and your CPU, the graphics that are built onto your CPU, but use your dedicated graphics card for gaming, and it will actually help you switch dynamically between those two different components when you're doing tasks that are optimized for them. Okay, the other feature that is unique to the Z68 platform is the ability to use Intel SRT, or Super Smart Response Technology, which enables you to use a boot hard drive, such as a one terabyte Western Digital Black or Blue, for example, and remember, don't use a green for boot because it's not optimized for that, and then take an SSD of 60 gigs or smaller capacity and use it as a cache for your big hard drive in order to get up to a four times performance increase in real world applications, and it does work, by the way, in case you guys were wondering. This board is fully SLI and Crossfire ready, which is something I hadn't mentioned before, and I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the world's first PCI Express 3.0 ready motherboard, the Z68A GD65. Well, it's actually the world's second and first because the GD80 supports the same thing. Remember to watch out for the G3 and the part number in order to make sure that it does support Gen 3 PCIe graphics, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.