Gadgetory

welcome to my introduction of the OSI certified concept featuring the MSI BIGBANG z77 mPower now I'm going to quickly explain the difference between what we've seen in the past and what we are seeing now because they are incredibly different in the past we've seen military class components high-quality components that are optimized for overclocking optimized for performance all of that good stuff we've seen digital power phases and you know the olden capacitors and all kinds of crazy stuff in the past before if we're not only MSI but everyone but OSI certified takes all that theoretically this stuff should be good and steps it up to a whole new level every single board gets hand tested at an overclocked setting in a non-ideal environment with prime95 that's right a true enthusiast stability testing program and we're gonna be having a look at this board in a real system in a real case with the real graphics card running real games to see what kind of a benefit we get from the EZ overclocking experience that an OC certified board enables and comparing it to a non overclocked system to see what we can do with basically what amounted to about 15 minutes of overclocking and yeah it was amazingly easy now we're gonna start with a bit of a product tour here guys so the z77 mPower is sort of a step up from the z77 AGD 65 they actually bear some similarity to each other in terms of the overall layouts of these boards the PCB designs and I apologize I'm gonna have to cheat a little bit we're going to use a picture of the z77 mPower and a real board for the GD 65 because the M power is in that system over there so the PCI Express slot layout is exactly the same however on the M power you see some significant improvements so number one is that it does include wireless connectivity while both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it also has a beefier 12 phase hybrid there it is hybrid digital power design which the GD 65 does not is using only an eight phase-- design so the digital hybrid power design allows higher power efficiency faster power transmissions programmable has a programmable microprocessor inside and is optimized for extreme overclocking okay it has better cooling significantly better cooling but it does have better cooling it's got a super pipe whereas the DD 65 did not it has I think a way better color scheme especially because it matches that gtx 680 lightning that I got in there I'm gonna pull off the side panel later and show you guys it's outstanding it has a thicker PCB which basically amounts to better power stability so again better overclocking six rear USB three that did it dip done there it is whereas the GD 65 I believe only has two rear USB 3 ports there they are okay and it also has total fan control so all the fan headers are using PWM connectivity and finally it is Windows 8 certified now some of the similar things are the onboard buttons OC Genie as well as v checkpoints so that means you can use your multimeter to actually check the voltages post LED readout as well as their multi BIOS switch which has saved my bacon on this exact board when we had a power outage while we were flashing the BIOS all we had to do was switch to the other BIOS and we were good to go so overclocking this 3770k was easy-peasy basically all I did was adjust the CPU ratio turn off some of the automatic turbo controls and whatnots asked my camera very nicely to focus on the screen for me change the memory to ddr3 1600 megahertz CPU core voltage to 1 point 2 to 5 volts and that was it now all we're gonna do is boot into Windows and see if we are stable now for the GPU because I was able to overhaul the Corrib zimble to get a plus 236 mega Hertz on the GPU boost for that lightning gtx 680 so that's where a lot of that extra performance is going to come from validating your overclock is essential there's a ton of tools out there I still use prime95 I know it's a little bit old fashioned but eight threads of prime95 running for 24 to 48 hours you can make sure you use CPUs that develop that you are running at the clock speed that you think you're running at and you can use real time GT in order to make sure that your temperatures are acceptable would I rather have a look cooller on this particular set up and get those down to closer to 70 to 75 degrees yes however 85 degrees under an artificial load isn't gonna kill it because you'll never see temperatures like this in a gaming environment or even when you're rendering video so I think that pretty much wraps it up for how to get your board running at 4.6 Jigga hertz which is what they validated out at the factory so let's go ahead and do some testing now now I'd like to introduce the tests that I'm going to be running we're going to keep things pretty simple we're testing a core i7 3770k against another 3770k but this one overclocked so there's no difference in architecture here so we're just going to run a couple simple benchmarks we're also testing a gtx 680 against a gtx 680 so again no architectural change so we're just going to do a couple quick benchmarks to see what we gain by using overclocking optimized or certified components versus ones that aren't so if you guys don't already know the difference between the gtx 680 lightning the one in here with the massive heat pipes all over it as well as the dual fan cooler and just generally beastliness that it's got going on is more than anything else the fact that it supports triple over voltage that means you can actually over volt the GPU pour unlike a reference gtx 680 this enables better overclocking and better stability and it also runs cool due to the fact that it's got the awesome full card backplane as well as again all the heat pipes and the beastly cooler that it's got going on I should run you through the rest of this test bench so we've got Crucial Ballistix tactical tracer ddr3 memory going on in here which looks amazing there's those PWM phases for the motherboard that light up when it's under load so we are playing a game so that's why those are all lit up and the memories going nuts as well there's our Big Bang board so I'm sorry I can't get you guys a better view that we're using a simple air cooler from beep light it's not even particularly loud and we've got an OC Z Z 50 watt power supply and we're running off of a much confer most deluxe SSD so the configurations we'll be testing our stock 3770k with a stock dt x 680 versus what we get with our quick overclock on the 3770k with do CE certified board and our maximum overclock we were able to achieve on the GTX 680 enlightening Edition see what we gain from a few minutes of overclocking for tests we'll be keeping it really simple Crysis 2 the Elder Scrolls Skyrim and doing a one gig video output test converting to Windows Media Video and rendering so at non overclocked stock settings as well as with the overclocked CPU it's not of a clock now and the overclocked lightning GG exit CD so its conclusion time and just for a lark I'm gonna experiment with overlaying my performance graphs instead of just talking about them and pointing the camera at them so basically this test system is pretty beast and what benefit do we get from having our overclocked graphics card and overthought CPU well the answer is it depends on the situation so for example in Crysis 2 you can see the performance difference between our overclocked system and our non overclocked system is only about 2 to 10 percent so what this tells me because most of our overclocking was done with the empower motherboard is that Crysis 2 was not particularly CPU limited so fascinating so the GPU was more of a factor holding it back and the GPU clock speeds didn't make that much of a difference so it's possible that the difference in performance could be more to do with the memory the lightning addition card didn't overclock that much on the memory only a few megahertz so once we moved on to Skyrim you can see we see a significant performance difference about 15 to 20 percent depending on whether you look at the minimum or the average of frame rates that means that this overclocked certified quick overclock that we did is yielding us an enormous gain in performance that usually is reserved for upgrading to an edition CPU now can you achieve this overclock on something other than a Big Bang is e77 empower the answer is probably you can however this one is validated and this one is ready to go so it's pretty much guaranteed out of the box as long as you don't get a total dud CPU now for our quick video rendering test we saw a 10% improvement in performance so that indicates to me that the CPU is faster and we will therefore save time if we are doing anything CPU intensive so in conclusion there's not much going on here in terms of the unexpected until CPUs are fast overclocking makes them faster and I hope you guys have found this to be educational and informative especially about MSI's new OSI certified concept don't forget 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