 Welcome to yet another motherboard unboxing on Linus Tech Tips. This is the MSI 990FXA GD80. So the title tells us a few things. It tells us this is a 990FX motherboard. It tells us it has USB 3 as I recall correctly is what that suffix means. And it is a GD80 which means it is part of their premium line of boards. So it has a 3 year warranty in Canada, Mexico and the USA. It features their military class 2 concept which means higher quality components for longer lifetime, cooler operation and better reliability. It features full support for AMD unlocked FX series processors. These are not yet released but they will be supported on this board once they are. Full support for AMD Crossfire X, Nvidia SLI and Windows 7. That's pretty much taken for granted. It features OC Genie 2 which is 1 touch over clocking USB 3 and SATA 3 6 gigabit per second. On the back of the board we see a few things here. High C caps with tantalum cores for 8 times longer lifetime anticipated. Super ferrite chokes for 30% higher current capacity and solid capacitors for 10 plus years of ultra long lifetime. We also have, hmm that's funny, it doesn't say anything about click bios on here although I would think that this particular board would support it. But I have no way of knowing for sure other than firing it up. So here is the quick guide which gives us a look at the, oh here we go, BIOS setup. No it does not feature click bios I guess unless they just haven't updated this document. Ok. There is a layout of the board itself showing you where everything is and what everything is but that's ok we are going to show you the board itself anyway. Drivers and Utilities DVD download the latest from the MSI website. Multi GPU SLI video link card. I think they mean cable but that's ok. Another SLI connector and another SLI connector. Now mixing and matching these connectors I am assuming you would be able to run 4 way SLI. So I guess that's what they mean for you to do. We've also got 6 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second connectors. All of them are right angle as well as 2 Molex to SATA power adapters. Next we have an internal USB 3 header to a PCI USB 3 bracket with 2 ports on it. We have the M connector to make your front panel connectors and front USB a little bit easier to hook up. Next we have a black IO shield. We have a hard drive backup utility user guide, quick installation guide, certificate of quality and stability. It's shiny as well. A software application user guide and a motherboard user guide. And it looks like based on everything in this user guide yeah this is a standard older style BIOS board. Although correct me if I am wrong on that one guys. Nope it's click BIOS. There we go. Yay we found it. So that means you can use the mouse inside the BIOS although that looks kind of weird. So it looks like an older style BIOS with a mouse cursor on it but I don't know what they're going for here. Also features super charger so you can charge your iPad, iPhone or mobile phone at high speed even while the computer is shut down. Very very useful feature. So let's go ahead take the board out of the packaging and we can have a look at it. I might even draw some little conclusions about what kind of board we're dealing with here. I can tell you right now GD80 is going to be a very high end board. Very overbuilt. You can see there's a boatload of power phases over here to the left of the CPU socket. I'm just going to move the military class 2 sticker here and you can also see that that is a socket AM3 plus. So that means that with this bracket you can put any AM3 or AM3 plus compatible CPU in there. That includes the upcoming bulldozer CPUs from AMD. You can also use any AM2, AM3, AM2 plus, any AM whatever CPU cooler as long as it supports the heat output of the CPU that you put inside. Alright we've got a nice little military class 2 styled PWM heatsink here. We've also got a heatsink for the chipset and another heatsink for the other more different chipset. Our 8 pin power connector is in the top left in its ideal location and our 24 pin power connector is along the right hand edge of the board in its ideal location. We've got support for dual channel DDR3 memory. It is color coded for easy dual channel operation. And moving down the board we have 6 SATA3 6 gigabit per second ports all supported by the AMD chipset. So unlike Intel chipsets that are currently out there, all 6 are running off the AMD chipset and they're all running at SATA3 6 gigabit per second. This is great. This is the first right angle USB 3 front panel header that I have seen and I like it. That's a great location for it because as great as it is to have your front panel headers down here where most of them still are, this is actually closer to the front of the case and thus more convenient. Here are our front panel connectors as well as an LED readout. So there's a post readout. If you're having any issues with the board it will give you an error code here that will help you fix it. Here is the front powered USB so that is the one that is good for super charger for the iPad or any other tablet. Charging them you will require that higher powered port and there's a regular front USB, front firewire, front panel audio, a little THX sticker going on here. Alright let's have a look at the PCIe layout. So we have 1 PCIe 1X, 2 PCIe 1X, 4 PCIe 16X and 1 PCI but let's have a look at what these are actually wired for. If you're going to run in 16X 16X mode you are going to want to use these 2 slots because those are running at full bandwidth. These 2 right here are only running at 8X mode so what that means is if you're running 3 GPUs you're going to want to go this one, this one, this one. So 8X, probably 16, 8, 8, 16 something along those lines would be my guess. And if you're running 4 GPUs it will run 8X, 8X, 8X, 8X, 2 GPUs, 16X, 16X. So if you do install 2 graphics cards you're going to be left with 1 PCI, 1 PCIe 8X and 1 PCIe 1X for expansion. Moving along to the back of the board we've got 2 dedicated PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse respectively, a clear CMOS button, optical and coaxial digital audio out, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 USB 2.0 ports, we've also got, yeah, oh sorry that was 6 USB 2.0 ports, right there is one of those funky eSATA USB 2 combo ports, very handy. Airwire port, gigabit ethernet, USB 3.0, 2 of those and 7.1 audio out. I want to show you guys where the fan headers are on this particular board. Here's our CPU fan header, that is a 4 pin PWM. We've also got a 3 pin here, a 3 pin here, a 3 pin here, a 3 pin right here and that is about it. So appropriate build for something like this would be a couple high end cards, probably somewhere in the 750 to 850 watt power supply range and a high end 6 core or 8 core processor. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 990FXA GD80 from MSI. 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