welcome to my introduction of the OC certified concept featuring The MSI Big
Bang z77 M power 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 that good stuff we've seen digital power phases and you know
golden capacitors and all kinds of crazy stuff in the past before from not only
MSI but everyone but OC 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 nonideal environment with prime 95
that's right a true Enthusiast stability testing program and we're going to be
having a look at this board in in a real system in a real case with a real
graphics card running real games to see what kind of a benefit we get from the
easy 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 going to start with a bit of a product
tour here guys so the z77 M power is
sort of a step up from the z77a gd65
five 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 going to have to
cheat a little bit we're going to use a picture of the z77 M power and a reel
board for the gd65 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 what both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it also has a beefier 12 phase
hybrid there it is hybrid digital power
design which the gd65 does not it is using only an 8-phase design so the
digital hybrid power design allows higher power efficiency faster power
transmission speed programmable has a programmable microprocessor inside and
is optimized for extreme overclocking okay it has better cooling yeah not
significantly better cooling but it does have better cooling it's got a superpipe
whereas the dd65 did not it has I think
a way better color scheme especially cuz it matches that GTX 680 lightning that
I've gotten there I'm going to 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 3 there it is whereas the gd65 I believe
only has two rear usb3 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 button OC
Genie as well as V checkpoint so that means you can use your multi meter to
actually check the voltages uh post LED readout as well as their multibio 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 ask my camera very nicely to focus on the screen for me change the
memory to DDR 3600 MHz CPU core voltage
to 1. 225 volts and that was it um now all we
got to do is boot into Windows and see
if we are stable now for the GPU because I was able to overvolt the core I was
able to get a plus 236 MHz 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 prime 95 I know it's a little bit
oldfashioned but eight threads of prime 95 running for 24 to 48 hours you can
make sure you use CPU Z to validate that you are running at the clock speed that
you think you're running at and you can use real temp GT in order to make sure
that your temperatures are acceptable would I rather have a liquid cooler on
this particular setup and get those down to closer to 70 to 75° yes however 85°
under an artificial load isn't going to 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 gz which is what
they validated at 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 over clocked 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 gtx680 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 so that means you can actually
overvolt the GPU core 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 back plate 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 the testbench so we've got crucial
ballistics tactical Tracer DDR3 memory going on in here which looks amazing
there's those uh pwm phases for the motherboard that light up when it's
underload so we are playing a game so that's why those are all lit up and the memor is going nuts as well there's our
big bang board so I'm sorry I can't get you guys a better view of that we're
using a simple air cooler from be quiet! it's not even particularly loud and
we've got an ocz ZT 750 W power supply
and we're running off of a mushkin Kronos Deluxe
SSD so the configurations we'll be testing are stock 3770k with a stock
gtx680 versus what we get with our quick
overclock on the 3770k with the OC certified board and our maximum
overclock we were able to achieve on the GTX 680 lightning edition see what we
gain from a few minutes of overclocking for tests we'll be keeping it really
simple crisis 2 The Elder Scrolls Skyrim
and doing a 1 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 overclocked now and the overclocked
lightning GTX 680 so it's conclusion
time and just for a lark I'm going to 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 overclocked CPU well the answer is it depends on the
situation so for example in crisis 2 you can see the performance difference
between our overclock system and our non- overclock system is only about 2 to
10% so what this tells me because most of our overclocking was done with the
Empower motherboard is that crisis 2 was not particularly CPU limited so
fascinating so the GPU was more of a factor holding it back and the GPU clock
speeds um 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 edition card didn't overclock that much
on the memory only a few mehz so once we
moved on to Skyrim you can see we see a significant performance difference about
15 to 20% depending on whether you look at the
minimum or the average 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 to an additional CPU now can you achieve
this overclock on something other than a big bang z77 M Power 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 or save time if we are doing anything
CPU intensive so in conclusion there's
not much going on here in terms of the
unexpected Intel CPUs are fast overclocking makes them faster and I
hope you guys have found this to be educational and informative um especially about MSI's
new OC certified concept don't forget to
subscribe to L Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos