Taiwanese component heavyweight MSI has announced the Z68A-GD80 (G3) mainboard which is the world's first to support the new PCI Express 3.0 standard.
Offering twice the bandwidth of PCI Express 2.0, or up to 32GB/s, the new faster PCI bus is expected to provide a boost to bandwidth intensive tasks such as gaming. Other new speedy formats are also supported such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s.
The high-end motherboard also makes use of what MSI describes as 'military class II' components which the firm says boost stability. The firm has helpfully scribed 'military class II' on the mainboard itself in case the owner should ever forget.
Also onboard is MSI's OC Genie II, an automatic overclocking feature which aims to easily overclock a processor safely in seconds. The Z68A-GD80 (G3) will support AMD Crossfire and Nvidia SLI multi-GPU set ups while the integrated GPU has HDMI 41.4 and DVI outputs.
The board has yet to appear in the channel so exact pricing isn't known. The non PCI Express 3.0 version, the B3 edition, can be found for a shade under £175 so the G3 is likely to be around the same.
Now how about those PCI-E 3.0 graphics cards?
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