MSI loves its spectacular-scale menu buttons and clock display, though the design minimizes the settings that we actually want to read. The enthusiast-oriented clock and voltage controls are available through a menu that uses around one-third of the UEFI’s total screen space.

Disabling Intel Turbo Boost meant accepting a 12x multiplier on this platform, so we had to leave the frequency-altering feature enabled in order to overclock our processor. Unfortunately, this is one of many boards unable to overcome our Core i7-3960X's thermal sensor problem, which prevents it from scaling beyond stock Turbo Boost ratios. A 119 MHz base clock was our best overclocking option, using the 1.25x boot strap.
A setting of 1.35 V was reported back to us as 1.36 V, though our meter read it closer to the set value. MSI adds per-channel DRAM reference voltage to the standard set of CPU and chipset voltage levels.

Our overclock ran into an uncharacteristically large snag in the CPU Features submenu because this is the only board in the round-up that does not let us reduce Turbo Boost ratio settings. A 119 MHz base clock yielded 4.28 GHz with all cores loaded, and up to 4.64 GHz in lightly-threaded applications. Firmware would disable Intel C-states when we tried to increase the lower multipliers, triggering the bug in our CPU. When we re-enabled Intel C-states, the multiplier would drop to 12x. We’ll blame our CPU for the fact that we couldn't utilize its unlocked multiplier the way most enthusiasts would. However, our inability to drop the single-core Turbo Boost ratio below 39x is something that MSI needs to fix.
The X79A-GD65 (8D) provides a full set of primary and secondary memory timing controls, plus a few tertiary timings for those few overclockers who know how to use them.
- LGA 2011 Motherboards, Just A Little Cheaper
- ASRock X79 Extreme6/GB
- X79 Extreme6/GB UEFI
- Asus P9X79 Pro
- P9X79 Pro UEFI
- ECS X79R-AX
- X79R-AX UEFI
- Foxconn Quantumian-1
- Quantumian-1 UEFI
- Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3
- GA-X79-UD3 UEFI
- Intel DX79SI
- DX79SI UEFI
- MSI X79A-GD65 (8D)
- X79A-GD65 (8D) UEFI
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: StarCraft II
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Overclocking
- Which X79-Based Motherboard Is Right For You?




ASRock X79 Extreme6/GB - very nice all black looks better than gigabytes atempt
Asus P9X79 Pro - new baby blue they use on all the boards... not for me
ECS X79R-AX - looks like my old pentium 2 board with the white slots
Foxconn Quantumian-1 - i like i like gives a feeling of the ROG ASUS boards
Gigabyte X79-UD3 - rip of from the ASRock X79 Extreme6/GB (lol) plus the southbridge heatsink looks old fasion and ugly.
Intel DX79SI - now this board for me looks good actualy more than good looks the best
MSI X79A-GD65 8D - also very nice love the blue + Black.
If you have one of the boards and i insulted it, wasnt the intention, just my view of the board>
One thing I'm not sure of is the acceptance and actual usage of eSATA. While practical at some level, is anyone actually using this MB feature or is this one of those things the MB producers can skip out on like parallel and serial ports? I'm not sure enthusiasts are all that into using their eSATA ports?
Personally, I think this is one of those money saving opportunities MB producers should consider.
Here -- where? You guy's may have gotten an early release, but how's that been working far? The official re-release is January 20th to retail. The reason I state this is because the track record has been less than stellar and in some cases often a 'miss-match' the the retail versions; thereby (WE) get ambiguous impressions and folks buying habits are incorrectly forged.
From the results I've seen, read so far, a ±2FPS~±3FPS can all fall within the margins of error; run the tests 3-4 times.
Then the reasons for 'choices' as 'best', IMO best must have 8xDIMM, 3-WAY, decent audio, good OC'ing, and adequate plus fast SATA ports. Asus P9X79 Pro and Intel Intel DX79SI, while I appreciate a budget 4-WAY Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 no one wanting 4-WAY is going to choose it.
- my 2 cents.
When will AMD be coming out with mobos with PCIe 3 support?
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/296572-30-where-mobos-promised
My D975XBX board is still holding strong after like 6+ years of owning it. It's currently sitting in my HTPC.
I'd definitely go for the Intel for that reason alone, but I've been really impressed with Gigabyte and the way my Z68 system turned out.
1. Not much better, I decided not to mothball my 980X and instead to only replace my GPU's with GTX 600 series when available and then with 3GB vRAM.
2. Not much with clock-to-clock comparison; e.g. 4.5GHz to 4.5GHz. Sure the SB/SB-E is slightly faster but in most resolutions none of them really impede or bottleneck.
3. (link) well it seems I was right PCIe 2.x versus PCIe 3.x -> http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/49646-amd-radeon-hd-7970-3gb-review-21.html the GPU's cannot saturate x8 PCIe 2.x so it will be quite a while if not years before PCIe 3.x gains ground to make it useful.
Nice review though and I understand how both of these things were outside the scope of what was being done.
I see what you're saying, but during BF3 my good trusty ole i7-960 and my two GTX580s are all hitting 100% at times (until BF4) running on ultra with AA and AA transparency cranked. I'm getting over 100fps at 1080p. I'd say that's a good equipment pairing considering I'm going on year three. If that's what an anal pounding is all about... Thank you sir may I have another!?