MSI Z77A GD65 Motherboard Review
Test Setup and Overclocking
Published: 16th July 2012 | Source: MSI | Price: £136.79 |
Test Setup
MSI Z77A-GD65
Intel Core i7-3770K
8GB G.Skill Trident 2400 @ 10-12-12-31
Sapphire HD7950
Catalyst 12.4
Cougar CM1000 PSU
Corsair F80 SSD
Thermalright Silver Arrow
Windows 7 x64
Overclocking
We'll come to manual overclocking in a moment. The easiest way to overclock your system on the GD65 is to press the OC Genie button then turn it on. It nearly instantly determines a decent overclock and applies it. In our case it pushed our i7-3770K to 4.2GHz, and set our 2400MHz G.Skill to 2133MHz. Not earth shattering results, but any performance gain is nice, and being so easy it does mean that even the most cautious user will never have to run their setup at stock settings.
OC Genie
Manual
Of course we don't just stop there, and some judicious tweaking later we obtained a rock-solid 4.8GHz on our i7-3770K, which is what we'll be using for our testing.
Finally, although it wasn't stable enough to run all of our tests at, this is the first motherboard we've tested that would boot with our G.Skill Trident at 2600MHz.
Most Recent Comments
A very good review - glad I made the right choice, and thanks to SieB for recommending the '65 to me!Quote
all i can say is, despite the bewildering options on the uefi (i really wish they'd agree on standardised namings across different uefi's) the board is godly and i'm glad my gamble paid offQuote
lovely looking boardQuote
CSS Valid
Thanks for the review Bryan.Quote