MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming (Z77) Motherboard Review

Whilst at CeBIT earlier in the year, I swung by the MSI booth to see what products they had to show off to the world. Now for most people that attended the show, being able to look around MSI's booth was not going to be possible as they were situated in an area that was out of bounds to the general public, meaning that only those associated with the industry, like us at eTeknix, could have a look. Whilst on their stand, there was something that caught the eye and in some respect looked a little odd. Typically when we see MSI motherboards from a glance we expect to see the blue or yellow highlighting that appears on their boards, however one cabinet housed something different and in some respects a little bit special. This change that caught the eye is MSI's new line of gaming orientated motherboards. The obvious question is why do they stand out so much? Well until now, MSI have stuck with blue or yellow schemes on their boards, but the gaming line use red - which to some is an automatic association with gaming. So why the new line? Well a number of other key players in the market have their own lines of gaming orientated boards, ASRock have the Fatal1ty association, Asus have Republic of Gamers (ROG), Gigabyte have G.1 and now MSI have Gaming. Essentially these new boards from MSI are tweaked and tuned variants of the standard Z77 range so at their heart they have a very similar product spec, but they feature some components that will benefit gamers during their online battles. The most notable of these is a NIC from BigFoot networks - the Killer E2200- which reduces in game latency by prioritising game traffic over other network communications. [youtube]http://youtu.be/QE6KcbkxLiA[/youtube] MSI's box, features a bold dragon on the front and everything is pointing towards the gaming aspect. A new MSI gaming logo sits to the right above the product name and on the flap to open the box the tag 'Just Game!' is printed. Inside there is a decent accessory set with four SATA cables, an SLI bridge, driver CD (although we recommend going to MSI's website to get the latest drivers), quick connect headers, voltage check cables, a bold case badge, red and black coloured IO shield and various manuals with a door card for warning others in the house that you're too busy gaming to pay any other attention. As mentioned, MSI have used red as the highlight colour for their Gaming line of motherboards, however they have been very sparse on where it has been used - simply on the VRM heat sinks and on the chipset cooler. In essence this motherboard In a similar line-up to the standard GD65, the Gaming board uses an array of solid ferrite chokes around the socket and conforms to typical Intel specifications. One of the key features that really stands out upon this board is the frankly, quite awesome heat sink design. From the top the heat sink is nothing special to look at, however its cross section is, with the dragon head shape used to increase the surface area available for heat dissipation (as seen by the shot on the front page of this review). The chipset cooler, like the VRM heat sink has a dragon embodied upon it and is the main visual highlight of this board. MSI boards are become a little known for having a set of voltage check points as well as an OC Genie button and this is board is no different with both to be found. Memory support comes with capacity for up to 32GB of Dual-channel DDR3 memory with stock speeds ranging from 1066MHz right up to 3000MHz when overclocked. Users of the standard GD65 will notice that the PCIe layout is identical to the lower spec board, giving three 16x slots for up to three way SLI and CrossFire X configurations along with a further four x1 slots. The boards headers feature plenty of USB2.0, one of which hosts MSI's super charger technology to charge devices whilst the rest of the system is powered off. The remainder sees the usual line of front panel audio and power headers, whilst above the headers to the right as a debug led that switches to a temperature readout once booted, dual BIOS and a switch to change between the two. Having an angled USB3.0 header is something that I'm surprised not many manufacturers have adopted as having the thick cable come right into the case can be rather unsightly. Next to this is a bank of eight SATA ports - the two on the right running at SATA 6Gbps speeds and controlled by the Z77 chipset with a further four run by the same controller but at 3Gbps speeds. To the far left and additional two 6Gbps ports are included, but instead are driven by an ASMedia ASM1061 chip. Whilst the NIC is not something that I would delve too far into, it is a prominent and key feature of the Gaming series of motherboards. The Killer E2200 NIC is an advanced interface controller that is build purely for boosting the network performance of online games by prioritising traffic for games and high-quality streaming media over everything else (such as web traffic and local network services). By prioritising this traffic, the in-game latency can effectively be lowered, resulting in a smoother stream of traffic when in-game and no stutter or LAg, which as any die-hard gamer will admit is highly frustrating. As well as the Killer NIC, there is also a bank of ports on the I/O that is dedicated towards gaming devices such as mice and keyboards. The two top USB2.0 ports as well as the PS/2 Combo port are optimised for higher polling rate mice reducing the response time from 8ms to 1ms. On top of this they also feature additional gold plating to ensure the best connection to the device is always on hand. Alongside the gaming ports, the I/O features two more USB2.0 ports, two USB3.0, DVI, HDMI and VGA display outputs, the Killer LAN port and 7.1 analogue audio along with a S/PDIF jack as well as coaxial audio, which is not as common on boards these days compared to a few years ago. Diving in the ClickBIOS II on the GD65 Gaming, the same theme that is found on the board itself follows through with the red and black colours along with the dragon. Aside this, what we find is a BIOS that is like any other MSI board. This makes it easy to navigate around, especially if you have come from another MSI board to this one. To test this board, we are able to run all of our tests at stock speeds using a pre-defined setup of hardware. We will also be overclocking the processor to its limits on this board to see how it compares against the stock speed. Test system: MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Intel i7-3770k Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 8GB AMD Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050 Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD Lian Li T60 AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: 3DMark 11 AIDA64 Cinebench R11.5 CPU-Z PCMark 7 Super PI As mentioned, the Gaming series of motherboards are based around the slightly lower spec mainstream boards, but this is not say that they don't have any overclocking capabilities. Being able to overclock a board an squeeze out the extra performance that is available form every component and therefore being able to gain extra performance when in-game is a no brainer for any gamer. Having the same, easily recognisable BIOS that MSI use on their other boards, makes for a good starting point. When overclocking these boards, there a couple of features that do need to be disabled to allow the board to go towards the higher clocks and also to improve stability, although these are not features that have to be disabled on other brands of boards. So before any overclocking you must make sure that EuP 2013 and uPNP (Universal Plug and Play) are both set to disabled. Moving on to the overclock, when working with the standard GD65, an overclock of just under 4.8GHz was achieved with a ratio of 47x and a BCLK of 101.95MHz. Working on the Gaming board, I was able to get our 3770k straight to 4,8GHz purely through a ration adjustment, although a little extra voltage than normal was required to keep the chip stable. Some Load Line Calibration and vDroop was also given to keep the chip happy under full load. With this achieved, the prospect was to increase the BLCK to give a bit more of a punch, but with the ratio this high, this was not going to happen. Dropping the ration down and raising the BCLK up did result in a successful overclock however nothing over 4.72 GHz was stable. Whilst this may seem like the board is not great at clocking very high, there are two points to take into account - the first of which is that this is not purely and overclocking board and if this is your domain then consider looking at MSI's own MPower board which has some rich features in that department. The second point is that only overclocking on the ratio side is a whole lot easier as the work is done solely on the CPU, whereas adjusting the BLCK affects the memory as well adding more stability variables in to the playing field. Cinebench R11.5 CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It's completely free. Marking the Gaming board against the other top MSI's boards that I've seen, this board performs at the same level as the MPower with a score of 7.14, just a little bit more than the straight GD65. Super PI Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits. Within SuperPI, a time of 9 minutes 23 seconds wasn't the best result that has been seen at stock, however overclocking the board saw a huge improvement in time with well over two minutes taken off, only 10 seconds off the fastest we have seen from any overclocked Z77 board. 3DMark 11 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. Within 3DMark 11, the expectation was that the result was going to be very similar to that of a straight GD65 and this is exactly what is to be seen with an extra 47 points under performance and 7 extra points under the extreme preset. AIDA64 AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Memory bandwidth, like the MPower board didn't come out as strong as expected, but this is not to say there is anything to worry about. The margins between different boards at stock are only slight and overclocking, as seen, opens up the processors memory controller, unleashing a heap of clearly noticeable bandwidth. AIDA64 AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Like 3DMark11 , the first of our disk tests performed right to the point where we expected and like other MSI boards, overclocking does give a little extra speed, in this case 14MB/s extra. PCMark 7 PCMark 7 provides a set of 7 suites for measuring different aspects of PC performance with a high degree of accuracy. Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark Suite. The Lightweight Suite measures the capabilities of entry level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the full PCMark suite. Common use performance is measured by the Entertainment, Creativity and Productivity scenario suites. Component performance is measured by the Computation and Storage hardware suites. The Storage suite is ideal for testing SSDs and external hard drives in addition to the system drive. Unlike 3DMark11, PCMark7 saw a clear gain in overall system performance, which is just what we want to see from a gaming orientated board, with the GD65 Gaming sitting just behind one of its rivals from Gigabyte. AIDA64 AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. A drop in USB performance when overclocked was a result that we found whilst testing the standard GD65 and it appears that this is something to do with the controller as this is the same story here with a couple of MB/s taken off the stock result, although this is nothing to really worry about. Power Consumption To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the system takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. With this board sitting between the GD65 and the MPower in MSI's lineup of boards, the preconception is that the power ratings are going to be of a similar affair. To no surprise this is just what is seen with an idle consumption of just under 100W, whilst under full load the board uses just under 260W - a little closer to the MPower than a standard GD65, but still very acceptable, although actual consumption is variable from build to build due to individual component draws. Overclocking saw a good idle consumption with only a 10W gain whilst overclocking saw the meter tip over the 300W barrier. For this board to wow me, it needs to show the world why it's a gaming board and at the same time that it's very much worth being called a gaming board. It is all good and well whacking the gaming moniker on a product, but if it doesn't perform in that market, then it's going to be one huge failure towards the manufacturer. So the big question arises asking if this board can do just that? Has it pulled it off, showing that it is worth every extra penny over a normal GD65? On the front of styling, I have to say that I love the dragon cross section that as been applied to the VRM heat sink, its unique and its also a bit different - most of all it is NOT anything military orientated, which has been a little big of mine for a while with gaming motherboards. The red colour scheme I also get as it generally associated with gaming, although some other brands use other colours and this is typical of Asus and ASRock on their respective products. The colour scheme is very low key and in its own way I like that, it doesn't make the board look too gaudy or out of place in a system. The performance front I'm similarly happy with, although i would have expected just a little more as this board is virtually on par with a GD65, only gaining a few extra points here and there, so it then leads me to ask if the features are where the focus lies. Certainly the Killer NIC is one key area where gamers would see the benefit of this board over a standard GD65, but to be honest I do feel a little short changed on other features. Whilst there is the themed BIOS and also the gaming optimised USB and PS/2 ports on the rear I/O, for the extra money I would have expected to see a little more than this. A prime example of what I feel has been overlooked is the audio. If you're a vivid gamer, then its not all about fantastic frame rates and low latency; if you don't have the edge on the sound front then you may miss a footstep of an enemy for example which can be a game changing opportunity lost. There are a number of boards out on the market now that include better audio and this is prime on other gaming motherboards with a huge focus on this as well as the visual performance. So what else would I like to see, well there are other boards that feature dual LAN or even WiFi, okay so WiFi and gaming generally go hand in hand, but with technology going the way it is, Killer also have a WiFi module, so why not include this. Also a little more presence on the USB3.0 side of things, either with an extra header or some extra ports on the back. To me it seems that spending the extra to get a Killer NIC and a gaming optimised port over a standard GD65 is a little unreasonable and therefore this board does feel a little premature, especially as Haswell is on the horizon and the focus is now on getting the latest motherboards ready for release later in the year. Bottom line, I'm a little disheartened by the GD65 Gaming, I feel that there could be a whole lot extra put on to the board in terms of features, especially on the audio front and maybe even Killer WiFi. Perhaps a v2.0 later on in the year will be more worthy, but sadly for now I feel that there are better 'gaming' motherboards out there to consider. [youtube]http://youtu.be/9W4BKlBTdkU[/youtube]