MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 Motherboard Review

Closer Look

The general color scheme going on here is black and blue with a little bit of gun metal grey and silver thrown in for good measure. The MOSFETS are covered by large heatsinks to ensure maximum cooling during heavy overclocking. There are 2 PCIE slots which are capable of 1×16 or 2×8 configurations.

The four RAM slots are capable of handling speeds up to 2400 MHz and capacities up to 32 GB. There are 8 SATA 6Gbps ports on the motherboard capable of handling RAID 0/1/5/10. The rear I/O panel consists of 2 USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, gigabit LAN, the standard 6 audio ports, and VGA/DVI/HDMI/Display Port connections.
Some useful power user features of this motherboard are the power and reset buttons on the board which allow you to use the board outside of a case, as well as the OC Genie button which will automatically give your chip a small overclock.

UEFI

The UEFI is pretty standard and easy to use. You of course have all of the standard BIOS features like setting boot priorities and monitoring temps and voltages, but for a motherboard of this caliber what we care about is the overclocking settings. With an unlocked chip you can adjust the multiplier as well as the base clock to achieve the numbers you are looking for. Turbo Core can be turned on or off, a slew of different voltages can be tweaked, and the GPU frequency can be raised. Memory speed and timing can also be set with ease or a preconfigured profile can be loaded.

After you have locked in your perfect overclock you can save it to one of the six profile slots so that you can quickly jump back and forth between different overclocks.
Aside from overclocking the MSI G65 has a few other cool features in the UEFI such as HDD back-up, live update, and if you install the Winki software you can even browse the internet before installing an OS.

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