MSI has announced it will be first manufacturer to launch a motherboard with third generation PCI Express. MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) is the name of the board and targets Intel’s LGA1155 platform, and will bring support PCI Express 3.0, for future support and better performance than PCIe 2.0.
MSI claims the new board is the first on the market with PCI Express 3.0. It’s hard to say if this is true since ASRock actually presented the Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3 last week. No matter how this PR battle ends we can conclude that the motherboard makers are getting ready for the new PCI Express interface, which according to MSI can bring extra performance today.
To fully use the increased bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0, double up from PCI Express 2.0 (1 GB/s vs. 500 MB/s), you need a processor and graphics card with native PCI Express 3.0, but there are no such things today, but MSI still says the new PCIe standard can boost performance with current PCI Express 2.0 products. PCI Express connected SSDs will gain up to 14% over other motherboards without PCI Express 3.0.
OBS! Only the G3 of MSI Z68A-GD80 supports PCI Express 3.0.
MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) is an enthusiast product and has Military Class II components, three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, four SATA 6.0 Gbps, four USB 3.0, Click BIOS II (UEFI) and OC Genie II.
The Z68 chipset supports Intel’s integrated GPUs and can switch seemlessly with discrete graphics cards through Lucid Virtu. Video signals go out through either DVI or HDMI.
MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) will hit stores later this month.
