Product Listing

MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Motherboard - The March of the Dragoon Army

By Wong Chung Wee - 1 May 2013
Launch SRP: S$329

Overclock Tools and Utilities

Overclocking using OC Genie II

The OC Genie II is a one-touch overclocking system that MSI has implemented on its high-end boards. We had to power down the board, press the OC Genie II button and power up the board again.

The OC Genie button lighted up after we depressed it. This is truly a one-touch solution to overclocking the board!

The board managed to reach an overclocked state with the CPU Ratio increased to 42, and with no change to the CPU Base Frequency that remained at 100.00MHz. At a clockspeed of 4.20GHz, the board scored a value of 8.41 for the Cinebench application. This was an increment of  almost six per cent over the baseline score.

 

Overclocking with Control Center and Click BIOS II

Our overclocking experience with the Control Center wasn't that smooth as we experienced system reboots that occurred out of the blue as we attempted to replicate the different parameter settings we had achieved during our raw overclocking exercise. We were grateful for the drop-down box implementation for most of the parameters as we could select the values easily with deft mouse clicks. After a few inexplicable reboots, we decided to throw in the towel. We concluded that the Control Center is useful for tweaking the system when it was already overclocked as starting from scratch in overclocking may just leave the user scratching his head due to the possibility of unexpected reboots.

 The Advanced menu for the CPU section allowed us to tweak the CPU Ratio for each core in the Windows environment. This would be appreciated by overclockers in their relentless pursuit to push their rigs' performance limits.

Our experience with the Click BIOS II application was much smoother as its interface closely mirrored the BIOS UEFI Utility; however, we were unable to locate one parameter called the CPU Core Vdroop Offset that we tweaked during our raw overclocking exercise. Despite this missing parameter, we would strongly recommend using the Click BIOS II if we had to overclock the system from its default settings in the Windows environment, but we were still unable to escape the need to reboot the system after making certain parameter settings.

The reboot warning dialog of the Click BIOS II application.

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8.5
  • Performance 9
  • Features 8
  • Value 7.5
The Good
Consistently good performer across all tests
Very overclockable
Killer Gaming networking controller
The Bad
Lack of bundled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity which its competitors offer
More PCIe lanes for multi-GPU configuration would have made this the best gaming board
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