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MSI has always been one of my favorite motherboard makers. The first board I tried from them that really impressed me was the P55-GD80. Up until then I had heard lots of bad things about MSI, but that board just blew me out of the water. Since then I have not looked back and have tried out an MSI board whenever I have had the opportunity. MSI has been kind enough to send us a X79-GD65 8D board. Lets take a look at it to see if it will impress once again.
"Since its founding in 1986, MSI has been demonstrating continued success in digital age. To achieve the best user experience, every component is essential. In the past 25 years, MSI always strives to provide digital products based on its core values –“Innovation” and “Style”. The results are products with superior performance, trusted reliability, excellent user experience and expressive style.
Embracing years of experience in design and manufacturing, MSI mainboard and graphics card have achieved maximum productivity by becoming one of the top 3 in the world. Our hard work have led us to become one of the finest brands in the industry with accumulated sales in more than 120 countries, 150 million mainboard users and 100 million graphics card users worldwide.
MSI has won the world-renowned product design awards and nearly 8,000 award recognitions from 350 media in 50 countries worldwide. With the brand slogan of “Innovation with Style”, MSI will continue to pioneer in global market as a principal brand in digital era, as well as lead the world in innovation in the field of global fashion technology with the needs of consumers at its core."
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This X79-GD65 8D will be paired with the Hex-core Intel 3930k processor. It has been put through its paces on previous boards, lets see how it does with this great MSI board.
I've always been curious about MSI. I know they've existed forever, but have always gone with different brands. (ASUS until their shitty motherboard was shitty, and EVGA that I haven't regretted. Yet.)
Maybe if I upgrade to Ivy Bridge sometime late this year I'll give them a try. Too late for new video card...
MSI are actually the leaders in bang for buck quality MBs lately. The only thing they've done in recent production that was a bit hokey was their one click OCing button. The Lucid chips haven't really caught on big either, but that was just someone else's brainchild they adopted.
I noticed in the specs it lists a max of 32GB of memory... That can't be true, can it? That's only 4 sticks of 8GB or 8 sticks of 4GB. I would've expected at least 64GB max.
That might be mislabeled, or they might have been thinking about the consumer base. It'll cost you about $400 to get 64GB worth of RAM (with how expensive the current 8GB sticks out are).
It's pretty common on such boards since the CPUs they fit support 4 channel memory.
Initial batches of this board have gotten dinged a lot in customer reviews due to a BIOS that didn't support newer 3000 series CPUs well though.
Those of you on the newer Intel CPUs should probably make SURE you get one with an updated BIOS version if you're considering this board.
The 4D version of the board was a POS and had tons of issues (I had them myself)
However, the 8D board had all of those issues fixed and works great
Quote:
Originally Posted by FileTrekker
Meh, I was enjoying your review, right up until it turned into an advertisement.
Sorry.
Care to elaborate?
if a board is good I will recommend it to people. There have been quite a few products that have been lackluster at best and got the review to match.
If I think people should buy a good board I will let people know its a good board
Last edited by kow_ciller; March 28th, 2012 at 08:48 PM.
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Tech Discussion 
Review: MSI X79-GD65 (8D) 
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