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The MSI P67A-GD65 motherboard is a full-sized ATX motherboard meaning it will fit inside any case with an ATX form factor or larger. They have taken to using an all-black PCB which is a cool motherboard color. The upper right hand side of the board has a row of solid capacitors. The 8-pin power connector is below the S/PDIF connectors on the Rear I/O.
MSI is really stressing their high-quality components and the heatsinks above their DrMOS chips is connected by a heatpipe. One of the heatsinks has Military Class II, the other has the OC Genie II logos on it. The CPU area is clear of obstacles. This is helped by the use of low-profile Hi-c CAPs around the CPU area and the use of SFC as well. Below the CPU area are four DIMM sockets for up to 32GB of DDR3-2133MHz memory when overclocked. The Core i7-2500K and 2600K CPUs natively support 1333MHz.
There are a series of LEDs right below the heatsink with the OC Genie II logo. The bottom of the board starts off with connects points for your multimeter You can attach leads to your multimeter and read the voltages right off the board. To the left of that is where two fan headers are located. Above the voltage connect points are more MOSFETs and SFC. The 24-pin power connector is almost in the middle of the P67A-GD65 board.
MSI has included eight SATA ports on the board. Two of these are SATA 6 Gb/second ports controlled by the P67 Express PCH. Four are SATA 3 Gb/second ports also controlled by the Intel PCH. The last two ports are SATA 6 Gb/second ports controlled by a Marvell 9128 SATA controller. MSI offers four SATA 6 ports which is impressive. The last items on the bottom of the board are the two Front Panel headers to connect your Power, LED etc.
MSI starts off the left side of the board with OC Genie button. The OC Genie is a hardware IC that controls the overclocking of the board, simply push the button while the board is in off mode and it activates. There is also a Power and Reset button in this location. To the left of that is the COM1 header, the TPM HEADER A USB header and a Firewire header. The next item is a USB 3.0 header for the USB 3.0 bracket. The SPDIF, the CD-In and the front panel audio headers round out the board.
MSI really put a lot of thought into the expansion on the board. While others may be content to put one or maybe two PCIE x1 slots on the board, MSI put 3 to allow users to install multiple PCIE x1 devices. There are also two PCIE x16 slots. These are spaced apart so you can install cards with up to three space coolers. The P67 Express chipset can do both SLI and CrossfireX. If two cards are installed the PCI Express x16 available on the Sandy Bridge CPUs are split into x8/x8 mode.
Onboard sound is provided by a Realtek ALC892 Sound CODEC. This is one of the latest CODECs from Realtek and supports flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing and is compliant with the Azalia specification. The back panel has a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, a Clear CMOS button, a Coaxial S/PDIF-Out, an Optical S/PDIF Out, a Firewire port, 8 USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two e-SATA ports, one LAN port, and 6 audio ports for the onboard audio.
