MSI Z77A-GD65 Ivy Bridge Motherboard Pictured

We got a first glimpse of the Z77A-GD65 motherboard for Ivy Bridge processors over a month ago, at this year’s CES 2012 fair, but now a new picture of MSI’s creation reached the Web, showing the final revision of the board.

Not much has changed since our initial encounter with the MSI board, as the company just added a pair of heatsinks on top of the VRMs and PCH controller, leaving the rest of the PCB unaltered.

If we were to take a look under those PWM heatsinks, we would notice that MSI’s creation uses a 9-phase VRM design in order to feed power to the CPU, which should be more than enough for even the fastest Ivy Bridge processors.

The board’s expansion features include three PCI Express x16 slots, four PCIe x1 slots, as well as eight SATA ports, as Tech Power Up’s picture reveals.

Four of these support SATA 6Gbps transfer speeds, two driven by the Intel Z77 chipset, while the other two are controlled by a third-party chip.

As far as the PCIe x16 slots are concerned, only the first of these can work at full x16 speeds as the second one has only eight PCIe lanes routed to it. These are however compatible with both CrossFireX and SLI setups.

Moving to the back, the connectivity options available include everything that we expect to see from a high-end Z77 motherboard, such as three video outputs (DVI, VGA, and HDMI) and an eSATA port.

MSI has also added two USB 3.0 ports that are driven by the Intel PCH, while two more such high-speed connectors can be routed to the front of the case by connecting them to the provide on-board header. 

No details regarding pricing are available at this time, but the MSI Z77A-GD65 is expected to arrive in April 2012, together with Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors.

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