MSI Z77 MPower (Z77) Motherboard Review

Given the fact that the Z77 MPower has been certified as the world’s first overclocking motherboard, we would anticipate that the ritual of pushing our 3770k as far as it will go will be a breeze and we should expect a fairly high speed. Naturally we know it goes without saying that we know this board will do much more that we are going to see here when running sub-zero, but this not exactly what one would refer to as practical for everyday 24/7 usage.

This aside it’s time to jump into the Click BIOS 2 and before we overclock we will disable a couple of features that we have found to cause one or two issues before with regards to power. The main one of these is EuP 2013 and the other is CPU OverSpeed protection. We have found before, on MSI boards that not disabling these options can lead to a lower overall clock due to instability issues, so just a little heads up before you try to recreate our overclock.

Getting back to the task in hand, rising the CPU ratio up bit by bit and adding a little more voltage to the chip (1.4v in our case) we soon saw the chip top out at a stable level of 4.8GHz which is not far off its maximum that it can do. We were able to get it to boot at 4.9GHz and run, but we found that when trying to benchmark we were getting some errors come up, indicating that the overclock was not totally stable, even after playing about with the voltages a little to add back in the stability.

We also found that setting the VDroop to level 5 also assisted the power delivery, especially when running SuperPI and Cinebench R11.5 which run the chip at full load.

Given the ease at which we were able to overclock our 3770k, we can see that this board does have a certain air to it and it does seem that it has got the potential to be a great overclocker when in the hands of someone with some LN2 to play with.