When MSI first unveiled their GAMING line of motherboards, everyone was saying why they’d introduce such a product so late in the Ivy Bridge game. When the Z77-GD65 GAMING was released, it had everything the original Z77A-GD65 had but has dropped the blue and black tech theme for a red and black dragon motiff. After the noise of criticism has died down, many in the techcommunity were in agreement: MSI had a great concept going here which revitalized their product line and injected a bit of identity to their vague product stack. The MSI GAMING series now joins the MPower/XPower brands as MSI’s premiere product lines.
Today we bring you our review of the MSI Z87-GD65 GAMING. MSI’s flagship GAMING series board for the socket 1150 platform supporting Intel’s latest generation Haswell processors. With e-Sports and competitive gaming growing at a steady pace, anything tagged with “gaming” is up for a lot of scrutiny. MSI goes further and got FNATIC‘s seal of approval for this board but real talk: enthusiasts couldn’t care less.รย Still, the board packs a solid resume’ of specs and looks but will this guarantee its a worthy board to build your Haswell system on? Stash your swords, lances and whatever dragon-slaying equipment you have and leave it to us to test this dragon’s mettle. Read on!
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Features
- Supports 4th Gen Intelรยฎ Coreรขโยข / Pentiumรยฎ / Celeronรยฎ processors for LGA 1150 socket
- Supports DDR3-3000(OC) Memory
- USB 3.0 + SATA 6Gb/s
- Audio Boost: Reward Your Ears with True Quality
- Killer Ethernet: Kill Your Lag
- Military Class 4: Top Quality & Stability
- OC Genie 4: Overclock in 1 Second
- Click BIOS 4: Easily Fine-tune Your System
- PCI Express Gen 3: World’s 1st PCI Express Gen 3 Motherboard Brand
- Multi-GPU: NVIDIA SLI & AMD CrossFire Support
- Sound Blaster Cinema: Realistic Surround Sound Experience
- Gaming Device Port: Optimized with Triple Gold-plating for High Polling Rate Gaming Devices
- Total Fan Control: Optimize All Fan Speed As You Wish
- Lucid Virtu MVP 2.0: Uncompromised Game Response Performance
- Super Charger: Quickly Charge your iPad/iPhone/smartphones even under S0/S1/S3/S4/S5 mode