MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming (Z77) Motherboard Review

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.