MSI creates first PCI-E 3.0 board

MSI's Z68-GD80 board has already been out since the launch of the Z68 chipset in early May. Now what the engineers at MSI have done is manage to attach a PCI-E 3.0 16X slot to the board.

However, this is not as good as it may seem. Firstly the problem with this is that with Intel processors the PCI-E controller is located within the CPU and since the socket 1155 sandy bridge processors have a PCI-E 2.1 controller they cannot fully take advantage of the new PCI-E 3.0 bus.

The technicians at MSI have claimed that although the PCI-E 3.0 bus makes no difference to graphics cards it does increase SSD transfer speeds by as much as 20% over the existing PCI-E 2.0 connection. However again there is a downside to this in that the board has 1 PCI-E 3.0 16X slot so if you choose to utilise a SSD PCI-E card such as a Revo card in that slot your graphics capabilities will be more limited.