MSI goes PCI Express 3.0 on Z68 at Computex

[hsakarp_kahtap]

If you've seen MSI's Z68A-GD80 motherboard then you'll think we've gone slightly mad posting a picture of the board as part of our Computex coverage, but MSI has done a new revision that will get the G3 moniker tacked on at the end. We're not quite sure how MSI has gone about it, as we didn't get a detailed explanation, but the G3 revision of the Z68A-GD80 supports PCI Express 3.0.

The explanation we got was that MSI has re-designed the board to support the PCI Express 3.0 standard, yet it's meant to be working with the current Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. MSI claim that there are measurable performance increases, although as there are no PCI Express 3.0 graphics cards, or any kind of add-on cards that we're aware of, the question is how this translates to real world performance once PCI Express 3.0 devices arrive.

The upgrade to PCI Express 3.0 is as far as we can tell the only difference between the B3 and G3 revision of the board, although MSI also showed off its Click BIOS II which is similar to Gigabyte's Touch BIOS, although with a different UI.

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[JayCub]

Cheers Prakash, interesting going pcie 3.0 even though no cards are available and as i have looked at a few other boards with no mention of this, im all for instant responses to applications, and makes me wonder just how big the market is for all these advances and no software to take advantage of it for the normal home user, maybe the games market will benifit most...

[Bearcat]

I'm sure PCIE 3.0 will be the wave of the future, but for now, would it be worth the extra expense?