This year at Computex 2011, MSI showed off their latest PCI-E Gen 3 motherboard. When Z68 launched, motherboard manufacturers continued using the most widely available PCI-Express 2.0 interface. As weeks passed, new PCI-Express 3.0 switches were introduced and MSI was the first to jump on the opportunity to provide their customers with the latest PCI-E Gen 3.0 support for their LGA1155 Z68 boards. ASRock and GIGABYTE followed closely as they also showed off their ASRock Extreme 4 Gen 3 and GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 2 motherboards with PCI-E Gen 3 support. Today we will be looking at the MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) motherboard. This motherboard is an upgrade from the (B3) revision, which still used PCI-E 2.0 switches. Though while MSI was one of the first to have a PCI-E Gen 3 motherboard, it also looks like they might have one of the first true Gen 3 designs, with GIGABYTE coming in 2nd with their G1.Sniper 2 motherboard.

It is not a coincidence that ASUS, one of the largest motherboard manufacturers, still doesn't have a true PCI-E Gen 3.0 motherboard. As a matter a fact, ASRock and GIGABYTE only have partially functional PCI-E Gen 3 support for their motherboard, but more on that on our motherboard overview page. We don't find this ironic, as there are no PCI-Express Gen 3.0 products which could potentially use the new interface. Not only that, but the current Sandy Bridge architecture only supports up to PCI-Express 2.0 specifications and does not have the potential to utilize the extra lanes that become available with the current PCI-E Gen 3 switches. With this said, the current motherboards that are currently sold as PCI-E Gen 3.0 motherboards will not be fully utilized till about early next year, when we see Ivy Bridge used as the next high-end CPU for the LGA 1155 socket. As of yet, we don't know too much about Ivy Bridge, but it should be a 22nm CPU architecture compatible to fully utilize PCI-Express Gen 3.