MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming: Packaging and Bundle3. MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming: Layout and Features4. MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark8. Synthetic: 3Dmark 119. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven10. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201311. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.512. Synthetic: Super Pi13. Synthetic: SATA Performance14. Real World: WinRAR15. Real World: MKV Playback16. Real World: Media Encoding17. Gaming: Battlefield 318. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops 219. Gaming: DiRT Showdown20. Technical: Power Consumption21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

BIOS

MSI have designed an attractive UEFI interface which quite different to those we've seen from the likes of Asus and Gigabyte.  Some of the key settings like boot order are located along a bar at the top for easy access and are present throughout all of the other menus.

The settings tab contains the majority of the non-overclocking related settings.

Under the ‘OC' tab we find all of the overclocking options.  Everything we could possibly ask for is located here.

The ‘Eco' tab contains a few basic settings which can be adjusted to improve power consumption.  The ‘Browser' tab features a web browser but this needs to be installed onto the hard drive using the supplied software CD.

Under the ‘Utilities' tab we find a live BIOS update utility, a USB BIOS flashing uility and a HDD backup utility

Finally, under the ‘Security' tab, we find options for chassis intrusion and an administrator password.

Overclocking

For our tests we overclocked our Intel Core i7-3770K to 4.8 GHz by bumping the multiplier up to 48x and leaving the baseclock at 100 MHz.  To achieve this speed, we only had to bump the CPU core voltage slightly to 1.35V.  We found that overclocking further than this required us to increase the voltage considerably, resulting in much higher temperatures.  While this doesn't pose an issue in the short term, it could reduce the lifespan of the system.

See validation here.

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