Introduction

It's going to take a couple of weeks, but we're going to get through the mountain of Intel Z77 Express based motherboards that we've got sitting here in our office. We've already seen a couple of offerings including the ASRock Z77 Extreme6, ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe and Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H. Today it's about an offering from MSI.

The particular model we're looking at today is the Z77A-GD65 which sits currently at the top of the Z77 pile when it comes to offerings from MSI. Carrying with it a price tag of $169.99, it's one of the cheapest Z77 boards we've looked at. As we've discovered over the years, though, cheap doesn't always mean bad.

As always, though, there are a few things we need to do before we find out just how well the MSI Z77A-GD65 can perform. The first thing we want to do is take a closer look at the package to see just what MSI is bundling with the board here today.

From there we'll move onto the motherboard itself to see what's going on with it before we head into the BIOS and see how Click BIOS II is looking. Once we've done that we'll check out our test system quickly and cover the overclocking side of things before we finally get into the performance of the board.

Package

Looking at the box we can see the normal run down of information which highlights some of the main features on the board with the Military Class III standard and OC Genie II being the major ones.

Inside the box we've got the normal line up of paperwork including the Military Class III certificate along with the driver CD, four SATA cables, SLI bridge and the I/O back plate.

Along with all that we've got a couple of extra cables in the V-Check cables which we'll cover in the next page along with our easy header connectors to help round off the bundle.