Exceptional hardware doesn't always mean your products have polish, but does this MSI board stand out from the pack?
MSI motherboards haven’t always had the best reputation. While the hardware has been exceptional, the BIOS has lacked the polish of an ASUS or GIGABYTE board. The X79A-GD65 8D has the potential to be an extremely high-performing board at a competitive price, but will MSI finally come through with a strong package or will the hardware once again be let down by an underdone BIOS?
The GD65 is a visually appealing board with a fairly inconspicuous colour scheme and unassuming heatsink design. The build quality of the board is very high, something we expect from any product released by MSI. Unfortunately the GD65 has a small issue with the fastening mechanism of the heatsink to the left of the CPU socket. Much like the Intel DX79SI, it's quite flimsy but shouldn’t cause any major problems.
MSI has chosen not to include any legacy PCI slots and instead go with a single 1x and five full-length PCI-E slots. This layout can theoretically support up to four-way SLI or CrossFire, but due to the spacing of the slots only three-way configurations are realistically possible. We're testing the 8D version of the board, which has a massive eight memory slots, but there's also a 4D version available with only four memory slots. Boasting four SATA 2 and four SATA 6Gb/s ports, which both support RAID technologies, this board should be able to cover your storage requirements. Tweakers will welcome the onboard power and overclocking buttons, but bizarrely MSI hasn’t included a reset button. The IO panel is fitted out with eight USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports, there's also a single Gigabit Ethernet port, CMOS clear button and both analogue and digital audio outputs.
In our 2D testing, in which MSI has traditionally been off the pace, we found the GD65 to be within a whisker of the competition. Similarly, in our memory bandwidth benchmarks, the GD65 was on par with the more expensive ASUS Rampage IV Extreme and Gigabyte X79-UD7. This is where MSI’s day took a turn for the worst, with some sub-par performances in 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark 11 that left it lagging slightly behind the pack. We were pleased to see the GD65 consolidate its performance with a solid Crysis result to round out our benchmark proceedings.
MSI has taken another step in the right direction with its BIOS development. It isn’t perfect, but there are no major flaws either. During our overclocking testing we found the GD65 to recover from crashes better than the competition and very quickly in most circumstances. We do however find the voltage and base clock adjustments too coarse – it would be great to see smaller increments available that enable the user to finetune their settings. While this board isn’t the highest-performing on the market, it put up strong benchmark figures against boards worth nearly double its recommended retail price. The MSI X79A-GD65 8D is good value for money considering its high build quality, functionality and included features.
Available from MSI, retailing for $360.APC rating: 7/10