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MSI Z270 Gaming M7 Review... Auto Overclocking that's GOOD?!

2017-01-26
motherboards are the most unsung hero when it comes to your computer we have to have it everything plugged into it graphics cards CPU memory power fans everything plugged into it yet what's it then we kind of forget about it but you don't want to scrimp out on your motherboard because literally it controls everything so I spelled motherboard you listen to your mum what you do you know what's in my mom you get it whoops so what I'm going to be talking about today are some of my favorite features here on Emma size newsie 270 gaming m7 we got a kind of a sneak peek of this at CES now I've finally got a chance to put it in the system here and we're going to be talking about build quality we're going to talking about some of the utility features that are included with it and what you can control on here and we're going to be talking about overclocking of course you're integrating it through the set overclocking I mean to me that's like the most important requirement of any motherboard but interestingly enough it says VR ready on the box it's kind of funny I mean technically all motherboards are v already it is very refreshing to see a gunmetal and black motherboard and not have some sort of Gotti's just weird color scheme shoved down your throat this one is very refreshing ly simple it is gray and it is black more of a gunmetal and black and we've got some shiny parts on there because of the steel armor which keep the dim sockets and PCI slots from making your motherboard Bend if you're pushing stuff on there there's a few things in this world but it is cringe worthy as listening to the creaking and cracking of a motherboard as you're plugging in your graphics card and your memory sticks that is that is literally some of the most terrible sounds to listen to but not this guy because of the steel armor now the chipset has a very flat nan in your face heatsink on there which is LED lit we'll talk about that in a second and of course the VRMs have a very beefy heatsink on there because this motherboard has a lot of overclocking in mind there's a lot of granular features on here that even people like me would never use because I'm not going for world records but you can control a lot of things on this motherboard that even I don't understand but that's okay because there are some very user-friendly features on here as well as where'll like the game boost which is actually a dial that's got eight different levels of overclocking on there and they've kind of gone through and determine what the most reliable settings would be for a particular frequency range whether particular and you just simply dial in the overclock that you want and it does the rest I'm usually not the kind of guy that would be excited about automated overclocking like this but I'm telling you right now it's very difficult for me to pull out a better overclock than these are able to achieve by spending lots and lots of time tweaking on it when this is they've already done all the work I mean they really are taking some of the fun out of it but it's also fun to be up and running at the max overclock you can get by simply turning a dial a game booth style on this motherboard actually has eight different levels of predetermined overclock settings based on all of their testing that they've done back during manufacturing now if you've got a 7600 K a 7700 K a 6600 K or a 6700 K you're in luck because this dial will control an automated overclock your cpu based on predetermined settings now those are going to be determined based on the CPU that's in there too so what level eight might be on one CPU is not the same on another so you need to look at the manual or the command center app which we'll look at a little bit later which will tell you what those settings would be but I think they're taking a page of Microsoft's book with their numbering sequence though because even though it's eight levels it's not one to eight it's actually one two four six eight ten eleven I still to understand that one now all the usual stuff of course it supports 7gn Intel six gen Intel if you have four dimm slots on there it can do nvidia sli in two ways or AMD crossfire in three way that's why you've got three 16x PCIe slots on there and then all the rest is you know pretty typical now MDOT to support it's got three turbo m2 sockets and one of them actually has a heatsink with heat pads on there to give you max thermal dissipation of your M to drive all right that's enough it's the same system that we've done in the past this is like its third form it's taken on down to 7700 K the MSI gaming x GT X 1080 is in there and we've got the same g.skill 16 gigabytes of ddr4 tried in the new one here now because I want to take as much cooling as I could in here is the fractal design Kelvin s 36 yeah the same one we use in the holiday ad can't forget that one what time is it guys I got a fractal design Calvin SAT six oh no it was like way too early for this so it's a triple one twenty by thirty millimeter radiator and I want to make sure has much cooling as possible it is quick and easy for doing some of the overclocking testing on this so roll that epic b-roll and then let's take a look at the you you so this is how you control the lighting it's built into the MSI gaming app it can control any of your MSI products that have LEDs on there so my game UX graphics card is also showing up right here because of that so there's red yellow green TL blue violet and white you can't choose any variants or any color of the spectrum you have to choose these hard-coded colors as you can see there's yellow green white and yes that's kind of unfortunate I was kind of hoping I could have chosen on a wheel or something the exact color I wanted that doesn't happen the effects are kind of lackluster also there's a breathing effect very basic as a flashing effect why anybody would use this I have no idea it's terrible there's double flashing which is double terrible so I'm just going to stick with a static color but as you can see though we have some green LEDs that are flashy or bright and in our face up there which really stinks you probably noticed it during the b-roll those are to tell you that there are fans plugged into the fan headers okay that's cool it tells me they're working I guess and that they're on but what sucks is they're green if they're DC fans and it's a red LED if they are PWM fans why I need to know that they're PWM or DC based on a color LED is something I have never needed or wanted in the past and any computer I've ever built in the decades I've been doing it so why why they're giving me that I don't know it's cool that they're giving me this but I don't need it I don't want it and it's ruining my color scheme here and what's even more disappointing is that if I turn off the LEDs you can see it turns off the graphics card it turns off the motherboard and it turns off those stupid green LEDs so that tells me they could have added a button in here to allow me to turn those off individually but again I can't it's either all or none but one thing I'm happy to see here is it does recognize my g.skill ripjaws Mouse which is right here so I can also control the colors of my mouse as well but look at that it gives me a spectrum wheel so it's kind of neat that MSI is supporting a peripheral that I've got plugged in that gives me more color feature than MSI gives me on their own product it's kind of silly this that you're looking at now is the MSI command center I'm actually very impressed with this and let me tell you why it gives us full overclocking control it gives us full voltage control control over our RAM control over our timings control over our fans everything is controllable on here it's actually not bad either usually these utilities are terrible so here's that game boost I was telling you about before right where you can choose the different levels right there's 0 1 2 4 6 8 10 and 11 so weird so much like I said it's like Microsoft's numbering sequence there but you can see right here because I have a 7700 case installed these are telling me the different ranges I have right here so it'll go up to 4.5 on 0 four point six seven eight nine five five point one and five point two so each level is just adding another 100 megahertz and it's going to choose whatever these settings are that it needs to be to give you a good chance that those will actually boot that way it doesn't mean it's going to work doesn't mean your CPU can handle it but it's going to try you also get full control over here your RAM frequency your RAM voltage your IDP frequency your Gd voltage everything is here it's so cool if you click advanced check this out we can go dance DRAM and then it brings up all of our timings we can control our timings yes you can do everything from right inside to OS now typically an old-school overclocker like myself would never do OS based overclocking but I've got to tell you man this is actually pretty good I'm not going to lie so right now we're running 4.8 gigahertz I can select all on the cores I can do per core overclocking if I want I can even increase the beat clock rate watches I'll put the beat clock to 101 I'll hit apply and watch this right here will go from 48 o9 to 48 48 just like that now it's running 48 48 so I can do my testing in the inside the operating system so if my test passes I can increase it and then test it again without having to reboot every single time that is really nice and last but not least you have voltage control here so we can do live changing of our V core voltage for overclocking and it's just it's just good I kind of hate that I'm saying this but it's good the software is really good now believe me when I say that no one is more shocked than me when I say that I like a built-in utility for overclocking inside the OS I'm still always going to have a soft spot for overclocking inside the BIOS but it's just it works and it saves time and it makes people like you that might be afraid to try it give it a shot and it's actually safe it's easy to revert it will revert itself if it doesn't work and you can go into the BIOS and do it later on if you want to kind of play around learn what some of those settings are if you want to now the board is not perfect like I said those green LEDs are bugging the crap out of me it really is B it's got two USB 3.0 front panel headers which is amazing because a lot of cases now are shipping with multiple USB 3.0 headers on the front which means that you're going to need more than one 3.0 header on the motherboard to plug them in well this one here is really strange it's got a 90 degree bit one right next to the 24 pin which points at a really weird direction why it's not pointing up I have no idea and then the other ones on the bottom yeah way away from where the other one is and these are big thick cables which are difficult to route and now you've got to split them two different directions just put them next to each other like everyone else's that's a I know a motherboard manufacturer might say well that it's not so easy to just say put it here but other manufacturers are doing it and when you're not it then becomes easy to say just do it as a consumer I think it's a big deal anyway guys I spent a while sort of taking a look at the motherboard let me know if there's any other ones you'd like me to take a look at I will definitely look at those in the future like I said motherboards don't get the respect and credit that they deserve alright time to go I spent an awful lot of time making this video but I also had a ton of fun making this so let me know what you guys want me to do starting to step up my game and I'll do the best I can to make you content that's fun and enjoyable to watch as always thanks for watching subscribe if you're new here like the video if you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next video
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