Introduction

Get ready for an absolute slew of motherboards. With boards from all the major companies like MSI, GIGABYTE, ASUS and ASRock to name just a few, we've got so many boards to show you over the coming weeks. Today, though, it's going to be all about the board we have on hand.

The MSI X79A-GD65 isn't all that new to us, as earlier in the month we did a full preview on it. Today, though, we get to dive a little deeper into the board and cover some of the stuff we couldn't at the time, including the BIOS and the latest rendition of ClickBIOS II.

There's not a lot more to say about it all really. With our MSI X79A-GD65 in hand and our beloved new Intel i7 3960X, we can get into the performance of the new board fairly quickly. Before we do, though, we'll just throw up all the pictures of the board from our original preview if you didn't already look at that, or simply can't be bothered now. We'll also cover the few things we couldn't at launch including the PCIe layout and of course, the BIOS.

Once that's done we'll get into the testbed system setup and talk about the overclocking side of things before we get into the performance side of things to see just what the new MSI X79A-GD65 is able to offer us.

The Package

There's not much that has to be said about the package that we didn't already cover in our original preview, so let's just move onto the board.