MSI Z68A-GD80 - The Board

Looking at the board, we've got a fairly standard kind of design going on with that darker colored PCB and blue highlights throughout the board. There are clearly some differences present, though, and as we move in closer we'll take a look around and see what exactly is going on.

Moving closer into the board, we start to get an idea of what's going on. You can see for the first time in a while we're lacking any PCI Legacy slots which is really nice and on the PCIe 1x front we've got only a single one. The rest of the slots are made up of PCIe x16 ones with a total of five being present on the motherboard.

We can't get specific on the speed of the slots, but if you look carefully you can probably get a fair idea by the wiring. Behind the battery you can see that both CrossFireX and SLI are supported, so you should get a fair idea of what's going on.

The bottom of the board is filled with all our little headers that we're used to seeing. Starting from the left, you can see we've got our Audio header and FireWire one. Moving on, we've got a fan header, Voice Genie header, TPM module connector and our two front panel connectors. Finally, we finish off with our USB 3.0 header and next to that we've got two USB 2.0 headers.

Turning the corner, we can see a total of eight SATA connectors present on the board. The six that face out all run off the X79 chipset, with the two white ones being SATA III and the four black ones being SATA II. The other two white connectors pointing upwards are SATA III and they run off the ASMedia ASM1061 controller.