MSI Z68A-GD80 (Intel Z68) Motherboard Preview

Introduction

We're still a good couple of days away before we can lift the curtain on the new Z68 chipset and with another one arriving we thought we'd give you a quick look at what's going on with the new chipset from MSI.

Unlike ASRock, MSI doesn't have any of the boards listed on its website, so where this sits amongst the others, how many they'll offer and all that kind of stuff, we're not 100% sure yet.

Knowing MSI, though, the Z68A-GD80 we're looking at today will no doubt be one of the higher end boards as it carries with it some pretty cool features. So let's get started and check out the bundle that MSI has got going on.

The Package

There's four main bits to the box of the MSI Z68A-GD80 and there's just an absolute bucket load of information on offer. The front gives us a bit of information, but the highlights are the "Military Class II" and "OC Genie II" features. The back then goes on to explain some of those features in more detail and tells us about a few other smaller ones on offer.

Moving back to the front, you're able to flip the box open and then see even more features on offer, while the bottom part of the box gives you a look at the motherboard and highlights some of the main features on the actual board.

It's just a really informative box, but more importantly it gets you excited about what's on offer from the board and what it's capable of. Unfortunately we won't be looking at the performance side of things today, but instead that will come after the NDA is lifted.

Inside we've got a bunch of paperwork related to the motherboard along with a Driver CD and I/O back plate. Also in the top right you'll see some little cables and another manual; this relates to a feature that gives you the ability to measure the voltage of certain points on the board. We'll talk about this more a little later.

Rounding out the rest of the package, we've got eight SATA cables, two Molex to SATA, SLI bridge cable and a dual USB 3.0 header. All in all, we've got a very strong package going on that gives us a bunch of goodies that you'll no doubt be making good use of.