 Welcome to another unboxing and first look. This is a bit of a strange product because we're pretty close to the launch of In-Cels Haswell architecture and that's going to require a new socket but MSI has just introduced their gaming series of motherboards so it's going to be pretty obvious right from the start that the Z77A GD65 gaming takes a lot of cues from the original Z77A GD65 with some enhancements so it doesn't cost that much more but it does cost more but you get a couple of things for your money so number one is right here on the front of the box and that's the Killer E2200 game networking so that's network prioritization for your games the killer software has some other cool features like being able to bandwidth cap certain applications through software like if you want to limit the speed of a YouTube upload for example you can do that they've also got some fanatic branding on I don't know how much team fanatic knows about motherboards but at any rate this particular series of motherboards is recommended by team fanatic and it comes with this pretty sweet sticker that looks a little something like this other than that we've got what is essentially pretty much a GD65 which is a very solid board one of my favorites to be perfectly honest on the Z77 platform and let's have a look at what they've got to say for themselves in the back so yeah you still get OCG&E2 which is one button overclocking military class 3 so that's military class components having passed the milSTD well I'm sure they mean standard not STD 810g testing okay and then there's the killer net ethernet right there which it's it's hard to say how much of a difference that makes over a solid Intel networking solution but when I was using it what I can tell you is that I did notice for particularly for me the a big difference in the convenience level of being able to make on-the-fly adjustments to how much bandwidth applications are allowed to use so here's that sticker I talked about before it's a nice sort of solid sticker got a 3m backing on it put that on your case should look pretty cool there you go what else we got in here all right four SATA 3 6 gigabit per second right angle cables all right we've got M connectors so those are for people who have trouble plugging in the little connectors for front USB 2 as well as front panel sort of switches and whatnot SLI flexible black connector those are my favorites drivers and utilities download this from the MSI website software and application user guide quick start guide user guide ah a door hanger love seeing these included I'm sorry busy gaming and I'm not here so those are the only two options I'm busy gaming and not here at all alright so voltage checkpoints and finally the back panel connector which has a new red and black color scheme you see that be real awesome alright so let's have a look at the board itself actually I shouldn't have said that the networking thing was the only thing that changed about it because there were some other things as well so layout wise we've got an all new cooling solution so there's a single heat pipe it's not a super pipe it's just a regular sized heat pipe that leads between two sort of dragon themed looking heat sinks they look outstanding I kind of wish that it was a design element that you could really appreciate from the top because most of the time you won't be looking at your motherboard from this angle but either way it does look outstanding and I do really I mean I kind of I kind of geek out over sort of MOSFET cooling solutions because I think they look cool so they've changed that other than that the board is pretty much gd65 DNA so you've got your LGA 1155 socket here supporting up to second generation core i3 i5 and i7 processors all the overclocking features of course enabled you've got an 8 pin connector here for your CPU power 4 pin CPU fan and then some more fans that are elsewhere we'll show you those later 4 DDR3 dim slot supporting up to 8 gig modules you've got onboard buttons which I personally really appreciate I use an open test bench a lot power reset and OC Genie which is the one button overclocking these little LEDs up here show you how many power phases are enabled up to eight power phases on your CPU so it'll really it's just an indicator of what your CPU load looks like here's your V checkpoint so you can check CPU voltage DDR voltage a few other key voltages using a multimeter rather than relying on software your 24 pin connectors and its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board this I love this is probably worth like money to me like I'd pay an extra few bucks for a board with a right angle USB 3 because those connectors are so bulky and the cables are so stiff that when you have to when you try to cable management it ends up coming in a big loop like this whereas if it's on the side you can actually run it somewhere directly without ending up with a big huge loop so love to see that we've got two SATA 3 6 gigabit per second connections that are running off the Intel chipset to SATA 3 6 gigabit per second connections running off a third party chipset and four more SATA 2 3 gigabit per second connections running off the Intel chipset you've got three USB 2 headers this particular one supports super charger so that's their fast charging for tablets regardless of whether it's iOS or whatever else a hardware dedicated multi BIOS switch and I'd like to tell a little story here about my gd65 board which saved my butt because we've got we had a bad flash in the middle of a power outage okay so we're flashing the BIOS power went out we had no UPS it bricked it all I had to do was flip the switch and we were back up and running and we had a review deadline that was coming up and it just totally saved our butts so that made me pretty happy so I love that switch you've got an LED readout for post problems another sort of dragon designed you know self-bridge heatsink honestly these aren't cooling much these days anymore so you know it's mostly for show three four PCIe 1x slots three PCIe 16x slots however it's strongly recommended not to use this one unless you are running a third generation core processor so that's an ivy bridge processor it should be noted that you're going to be running an 8x 8x mode if you're running SLI or crossfire and I do not recommend using really any z77 board for three-way SLI or crossfire configurations because even the ones that have switches on them I mean there are latency implications to do with that as well so alright the other the other improvement that's being made here is a sound blaster cinema implementation however this is a software implementation it's still using a real tech chipset so it's hard to say how much of an improvement that's going to deliver in terms of things like you know headphone clarity or whatever else but at least you get some more software functionality to go along with your new gaming motherboard and the last thing that I did miss initially was gaming ports so they do have USB ports on the board that are specifically optimized for 1000 Hertz polling rates which some high-end peripherals do support so you've got a ps2 keyboard mouse combo port I do still like to see these for USB 2.0 ports CMOS clear switch optical and coaxial digital audio out HDMI VGA and DVI two USB 3.0 ports there's that killer Nick port and you've also got 7.1 audio out other than that it's a gd65 it's a gd65 with a better color scheme that costs a little bit more do I object to this no I mean I mean if you really think about it it's like what kind of a build do you want to make do you want a red one a yellow one or a blue one because you could buy yourself an M power a gd65 gaming or a gd65 and you're going to have a pretty similar experience you know the M power is obviously OC certified which means that they hand test every board for overclocking the gaming one has the better LAN and sound implementations and then the gd65 vanilla is the vanilla board but they all have pretty much the same functionality and pretty much the same performance when it comes down to it don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos and I hope you enjoyed this video about the Z77 a gd65 gaming