MSI Z77A-GD65 (Z77) Motherboard Review

First off, we want to admit; our i7 3770k isn’t the best clocker in the world. In fact, it’s pretty damn right terrible, but we will try our best with it, so here we go.

The MSI BIOS is something we’ve only had limited experience with, but things are pretty easy to understand from the offset, especially if overclocking is your passion. With that in mind, we booted into the BIOS and managed to set the multiplier to 46x and increase the voltage to 1.35V. After booting into Windows, we went straight into Prime95 and discovered that this was a safe and stable overclock, and continued to run our 4.6GHz tests for the rest of the review.

After this, we wanted to see how far we could push things, and had the aim of 4.8GHz in our sights, but we knew, coupled with our lousy clocking retail 3770k, this may not be the easiest task in the world. Either way, we soldiered on through and managed to get our multiplier to 47x and a slight increase of the voltage to 1.38 seemed to give us our sweet spot on this board, though a slight increase to the PLL and SA voltages were also needed. The next logical step was of course; 4.8GHz, so first up we tried to increase the multiplier to 48x, but while the system booted, Windows soon crashed and left us with a BSOD. Increasing the voltage didn’t seem to make much change, with only Windows taking a little longer to eventually crash.

With this in mind, we went down the route of dropping back to the 47x multiplier, and instead, increasing the BCLK to see if we could reach 4.8GHz that way. After lots of reboots and tweaking of settings, we could see that 4.8GHz was just out of reach, and instead, altered the vdroop settings and settled on 1.4V in the end, to get our final overclock.

It seemed that this board would allow our chip to be pushed to 4791.73MHz through use of a 47x multiplier and 101.95MHz BCLK with 1.4V. While we could have increased our voltage ever so slightly more, due to the watercooling units we use, we don’t feel that as a 24/7 overclock, it was suitable and was still happy with the clock that we managed to get from our frankly, poor i7 3770k