 Welcome to my first X79 motherboard unboxing. This is the MSI X79A GD65 8D. So there are two versions of the GD65. This is the 8D version. I'll get into what that means a little bit later. Top quality and stability means we have, yes, military class 3 components on this particular board. So MSI's military class concept was introduced a couple of generations ago and basically what it amounted to was high quality components that are designed to last a lot longer than the 3 year warranty that they provide. In terms of certifications and support, we've got Intel X79 chipset, supports Intel Core i7 up to extreme edition, hence the black logo, Windows 7, Radeon including Crossfire X, SLI, and 1 second overclocking with OC Genie 2. Let's go ahead and flip over onto the back of the board where we'll find a little bit of information about military class 3. So we have a second generation of DR or Dr. Moss. We've got, let's see, 3 in 1 package, double the thermal protection, and it gives you an LED warning at 115 degrees and auto shuts down at 130 degrees. So you are protected with double thermal protection. Interesting. Highly conductive polymerized capacitors or Hi-C caps which MSI claims have up to an 8 times longer lifespan than standard solid capacitors. Super ferrite chokes were also part, and solid caps were also part of MSI's military class 2 concept which provide, check this out, up to 12 years of constant full load gaming lifetime and 40 years in an office. If you're still using this computer in 40 years, then it is time for an upgrade. World's first PCI Express Gen 3 main board brand. Yes, they were the first with PCIe Gen 3, and this is a PCIe Gen 3 board, and this one's actually awesome. Click BIOS 2 is a phenomenal layout for the UEFI BIOS that MSI includes on their boards. Click BIOS 1 was pretty good, but I'd say ASUS's implementation was a little bit better. With Click BIOS 2, they've actually got what I would say is the fastest to navigate BIOS implementation out there, although I haven't seen ASUS or Gigabyte's X79 boards yet. Included is a little diagram of your board pointing out all the different switches and slots and what you can do with them. There's a couple things here that I would like to, actually you know what, I'm just going to leave this out and then we'll look at them on the board itself. Here is a multi-GPU SLI bridge. Here are your M connectors which allow you to easily plug in your front panel connectors as well as one of your USB headers. Here we have USB 3 back port, I.O. shield with an internal USB 3 connector so you can add additional USB 3 ports to the back of your system if you don't have front USB 3. There's your I.O. shield. Here's your drivers and utilities DVD. Go ahead and download the latest from the MSI website. Here's a little MSI quick installation guide showing you how to do some of the basics including hard drive installation, CPU installation, all that good stuff. I'm not going to look too closely at that. SATA cables. How many SATA cables do we get? We get 4 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables and a couple of Molex to SATA power adapters. We also get one of these cool adapters. So this is an eSATA to SATA cable, a Molex to dual SATA power cable and then two eSATA ports and a Molex port. So we can plug in two bare drives externally which is great for pulling data off drives when you don't have an enclosure handy. Software application user guide and finally a user guide for the board itself. Now let's pull out the board itself because we have gone through all of the accessories and oh look at that the board is the package is open where the I.O. ports were. This is an engineering sample board so I don't expect the retail packaging to be pristine just so you guys know. Your board shouldn't come with holes on the I.O. ports. I can pretty much assure you of that. So let's go ahead and check out the layout. So first let's take off the sticker. World's first PCI Express Gen 3. We'll throw that on there. And this is an LGA 2011 socket. So it requires not one but two lever arms. There we go. To pull it up or to rather to unlock it. It's an enormous socket. And then when you're putting it back down you're going to go ahead and secure the CPU. So this is the pin protector. You'll remove that when you install your CPU. And then you need to put this one in first and then this one in order to fully lock the CPU into the socket. So here's our power delivery system going around the 2011 socket which is only compatible with LGA 2011 processors. Not backwards compatible. Don't try and put a 1366 core i7 in there. It's not going to work. Here we have the 8D portion of this particular board. It does support quad channel DDR3 up to 8 DIMMs which means that if you're using 8 gig DIMMs yes it can support up to 64 gigs of memory. No big deal. Pretty outstanding. So you're going to want to populate all four blue slots or all four black slots. That is the way the color coding is going to work when you are filling up these memory banks. Okay up here in the top left in its ideal location we have our 8 pin CPU connector. And then moving over to the right. It's so funny because this is usually where the VRM is and I see like four slots here and I want to say now we've got dual channel DDR3. Yeah wrong, wrong quad channel DDR3. Okay so here we have our 24 pin power connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge. We have a multi BIOS switch right here which allows you to switch between two physical BIOS chips for the ultimate in BIOS profiling and also to back up in the event of a corrupted BIOS. Very cool. Here on the side we have four SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and four SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports. So you have some flexibility there. Over here we have a post diagnostic LED. Then we have a USB 2 front panel header with charging. So this allows you to, this is a high powered one which allows you to charge your iPad for example, high powered devices off of the front ports that this one's plugged into. This is not the high powered one. We've also got USB 3 front panel and then what else we got here? So we have, hmm actually we can check this out. So here's your front panel connectors and then we've also got your voice genie connector. Fascinating. So that looks like that's going to be an optional add on for this particular board because it didn't come with it. We've also got our OC genie button which is your one button overclocking, built in power button and built in direct OC buttons. So that is your base clock adjustments that you can make with your physical buttons here. Front fire wire, auxiliary power for the five PCIe 6 pin connectors. So if you do populate all those you're going to want to plug that in. And finally front panel audio. So this board has the works on it. In terms of the PCIe slot layout we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 total slots. Remember with all the space that these DIMMs are taking up it's a lot harder to put a slot here. Duh. I mean look how long they are. So you are stuck with 6 PCIe slots on most of the x79 boards that I've seen so far. We've got 1 2 3 that are wired up for 16x connectivity and then this guy right here is wired up for 8x and this guy right here is also wired up for 8x. This is a PCIe 1x slot so your ideal configuration on this board is going to be to go 1 2 3 cards in 3 way SLI or crossfire with a single additional slot left over for a sound card or a raid card or some other kind of card. Now if you install a full sized dual slot card in this bottom slot you're going to want to make sure that you have a case like the Corsair 800D that has 8 expansion slots so that you're going to have somewhere to secure that card and somewhere to exhaust the heat that is coming out the back of it. Now let's go ahead and have a look at the I.O. ports on the back of the board. So we've got a PS2 port. Yes PS2 is here to stay it just keeps not going away. We've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0 ports, a CMOS clear switch here, optical audio out, coaxial audio out, firewire as well as gigabit ethernet, 2 USB 3.0 ports and 7.1 audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the X79A GD658D. This is the board that I am planning to use on my NCIXcom channel for our overclocking guide so stay tuned for that. It's going to be exciting time.