MSI Z77A-GD65 (Z77) Motherboard Review

We're back again with another board from MSI, this time from their Z77 product lineup, which as we know is the latest Intel chipset offering a few new added extras over Z68 including PCI-Express 3.0 and native USB 3.0 to name a few of the major aspects. Lately we've taken a look at boards from other brands including the Asus Maximus V Gene and Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H, but we can assure you that we have plenty more along the way from a variety of manufacturers, though today is all about MSI. When the Intel Z77 chipset was announced, MSI were quick to jump on board with a range of boards including the Z77A-G43, Z77MA-G45, Z77A-G45, Z77A-GD55 and the board we're looking at today; the Z77A-GD65. The GD65 is the top Z77 board from MSI, and while from the offset it seems to offer some strong features, it also comes with an attractive price tag at $189. With this being an MSI board, and our experience generally sits with other manufacturers, we are extremely keen to see what this is capable of in terms of performance. With that in mind, we would normally take you on a tour of the board, but we already did so in our Z77 preview, which can be found here and without wanting to cover old ground, we invite you to check it out if you are interested in the features that are on offer. In terms of performance, we'll jump straight into it and pair this board up with our i7 3770k Ivy Bridge processor and Radeon 7970 to see what it's capable of at both stock and overclocked levels. 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 4.6GHz to see how the board compares against the stock speed. Also in terms of overclocking, we will be looking to see how far we can push the processor. Test system: MSI Z77A-GD65 Intel Core i7 3770k Kingston HyperX 2133MHz 16Gb AMDGigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050 Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 3 x 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 Metro 2033 Super PI 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 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. Starting with Cinebench, straight out of the box, the Z77A-GD65 gave some solid results that fell inline with the other boards we tested. We saw a healthy increase in score once we had the CPU overclocked to 4.6GHz. 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. Moving over to Super PI, we see the GD65 giving good results again, though the slowest compared to our other boards, even if only by a few seconds. A noticeable two minutes were shaved off of the calculation time when overclocked. 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. Moving over to the more gaming related tests, we can see that within 3DMark11, the GD65 at stock speeds was the worst performer compared to the other boards, but the marginal difference isn't substantial at all. The overclock saw a small increase, though other boards at stock seemed to give higher results. Metro 2033 Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. Within Metro 2033, the GD65 at stock fell inline with its competitors, and the overclock gave only a 1FPS difference on the lower resolution, though other boards offered the same performance, while at stock speeds. 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. Moving over to memory tests, we can see that straight out of the box, running at stock speeds, our 1866MHz memory gave some really good results, with the best among our various boards that we had to test against. When overclocked, the read, write and copy speeds excelled forward by quite large amounts, without even adjusting the memory speeds through overclocking, as this was all done through just tweaking the CPU speed. 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. Looking at how well the SATA III bandwidth was, we see the GD65 giving similar results to the other boards in our tests. The overclock did manage to push the speed up by around 10MB/s and almost maxing out our SSD in terms of speed. 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. Taking a look at PCMark7 and how the whole system operates together. The GD65 from MSI gave some really strong results at stock, with only the Z77-D3H and G1.Sniper M3 being slightly ahead. Overclocking the CPU allowed an extra 800 points to be gained, which is a fantastic boost, just from tweaking one component; the processor. 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. Going back into AIDA, we can start to look at USB 3.0 and how well this board can cope with our Kingston HyperX drive. At stock, we saw 285MB/s which is just where we expected, though the overclock actually saw a very slight decrease in speed, with an average of 283MB/s. While 2MB/s isn't a lot, to some it can mean quite a lot.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. Straight out of the box, we see an idle power usage of 72 Watts, which is the lowest we've had across the Z77 series so far. At load, we saw the system peak to 222 Watts, which is still extremely low considering some of the components used. By overclocking and increasing the voltage, we saw the idle power usage rise to 88 Watts, which is still remarkably low. At load, the system managed to stay under 300 Watts with a very attractive 274 Watts being used. As said at the start, we were keen to take a look at this board, as you'll usually see us with Asus or Gigabyte boards in our hands, and a look at something new and slightly different can be quite refreshing and it certainly was. MSI have tried to cater for all ends of the scale with their Z77 product lineup by offering boards for the budget concious, right up to the enthusiast, like we had today. At the time of writing this, the GD65 is currently the top Z77 based board for MSI that has been released, but we are aware of the GD80 coming soon, which from the looks of things, will offer a bit more in terms of features, such as Thunderbolt, but that's for later on, so we won't dwell on it to much. For now, the Z77A-GD65 really stands out, as it offers some nice features, with a lot that are unique to MSI, and the majority of this comes down to the quality, with their Military Class III components, coupled with key performance features, such as OC Genie II and Click BIOS II and THX authorised sound. These are all aspects that will appeal to the mass market, and ends up ticking some of the right boxes for our own criteria. Styling on the board is second to none, with a dark blue and black contrast, which really gives the board an upmarket feel and shows that it's here to do business and it does exactly that in terms of performance and overclockability. The performance on the board fell where it should, in comparison to other boards, yet most of the other boards were aimed at the extremist market, yet the GD65 is able to rival that, at an enthusiast/mainstream level, which is great news for MSI, but maybe not so much for their competitors. In terms of the way this board performed, the thing that we liked the most, was how far it let us push our pretty dire i7 3770k. We made it clear that we haven't exactly got the best clocking chip in the world, yet the GD65 was able to push it further than any other board so far which is great in our eyes. After hearing me talk about features, overclockability, quality, design and style, you will automatically be thinking that it's going to cost an arm and a leg, but at a measly $189, it's one of the best priced Z77 boards on the market, not just from MSI, but from the other big brands including Asus, ASRock and Gigabyte. MSI even thought about the little details with this board, like the package and bundle that comes on offer, and how the BIOS has been improved over previous generation versions. With specialist features aimed at overclocking, they have a very large segment of the market, that this board could be aimed at, especially with the SLI and CrossFireX capabilities, debug LED and quick clocking buttons, and various display connectors on the rear I/O. We simply can't think of any part of the market, that this couldn't be aimed at, especially with the price being so attractive. For me, the Z77A-GD65 really does offer amazing bang for buck, but on the same hand, is an extreme performer, and offers innovation at its finest, while being an overclockers dream. Gamers are sure to love its capabilities too and that's why we can only offer it the best award around; the Editor's Choice Award.