MSI Big Bang Mpower OC Certified Motherboard Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,744 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to my introduction of the OC certified concept featuring The MSI Big
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Bang z77 M power now I'm going to quickly explain the difference between
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what we've seen in the past and what we are seeing now because they are
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incredibly different in the past we've seen military class components high
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quality components that are optimized for overclocking optimized for
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performance all that good stuff we've seen digital power phases and you know
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golden capacitors and all kinds of crazy stuff in the past before from not only
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MSI but everyone but OC certified takes all that theoretically this stuff should
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be good and steps it up to a whole new level every single Board gets hand
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tested at an overclocked setting in a nonideal environment with prime 95
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that's right a true Enthusiast stability testing program and we're going to be
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having a look at this board in in a real system in a real case with a real
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graphics card running real games to see what kind of a benefit we get from the
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easy overclocking experience that an OC certified board enables and comparing it
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to a non overclocked system to see what we can do with basically what amounted
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to about 15 minutes of overclocking and
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yeah it was amazingly easy now we're going to start with a bit of a product
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tour here guys so the z77 M power is
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sort of a step up from the z77a gd65
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five they actually Bear some similarity to each other in terms of the overall
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layouts of these boards the PCB designs and I apologize I'm going to have to
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cheat a little bit we're going to use a picture of the z77 M power and a reel
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board for the gd65 because the M power is in that system over there so the PCI
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Express slot layout is exactly the same however on the M Power you see some
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significant improvements so number one is that it does include Wireless
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connectivity what both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it also has a beefier 12 phase
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hybrid there it is hybrid digital power
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design which the gd65 does not it is using only an 8-phase design so the
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digital hybrid power design allows higher power efficiency faster power
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transmission speed programmable has a programmable microprocessor inside and
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is optimized for extreme overclocking okay it has better cooling yeah not
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significantly better cooling but it does have better cooling it's got a superpipe
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whereas the dd65 did not it has I think
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a way better color scheme especially cuz it matches that GTX 680 lightning that
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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
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which basically amounts to better power stability so again better overclocking
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six rear USB 3 there it is whereas the gd65 I believe
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only has two rear usb3 ports there they
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are okay and it also has total fan
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control so all the fan headers are using pwm connectivity and finally it is
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Windows 8 certified now some of the similar things are the onboard button OC
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Genie as well as V checkpoint so that means you can use your multi meter to
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actually check the voltages uh post LED readout as well as their multibio switch
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which has saved my bacon on this exact board when we had a power outage while
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we were flashing the BIOS all we had to do was switch to the other BIOS and we
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were good to go so overclocking this 3770k was easy peasy basically all I did
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was adjust the CPU ratio turn off some of the automatic Turbo Controls and
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whatnots ask my camera very nicely to focus on the screen for me change the
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memory to DDR 3600 MHz CPU core voltage
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to 1. 225 volts and that was it um now all we
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got to do is boot into Windows and see
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if we are stable now for the GPU because I was able to overvolt the core I was
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able to get a plus 236 MHz on the GPU
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boost for that lightning GTX 680 so that's where a lot of that extra
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performance is going to come from validating your overclock is essential
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there's a ton of tools out there I still use prime 95 I know it's a little bit
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oldfashioned but eight threads of prime 95 running for 24 to 48 hours you can
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make sure you use CPU Z to validate that you are running at the clock speed that
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you think you're running at and you can use real temp GT in order to make sure
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that your temperatures are acceptable would I rather have a liquid cooler on
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this particular setup and get those down to closer to 70 to 75° yes however 85°
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under an artificial load isn't going to kill it because you'll never see
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temperatures like this in a gaming environment or even when you're rendering video so I think that pretty
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much wraps it up for how to get your board running at 4.6 gz which is what
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they validated at at the factory so let's go ahead and do some testing now
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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
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a core i7 3770k against another 3770k
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but this one over clocked so there's no difference in architecture here so we're
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just going to run a couple simple benchmarks we're also testing a GTX 680
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against a gtx680 so again no architectural change so we're just going
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to do a couple quick benchmarks to see what we gain by using overclocking
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optimized or certified components versus ones that aren't so if you guys don't
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already know the difference between the GTX 680 lightning the one in here with
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the massive heat pipes all over it as well as the dual fan cooler and just
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generally beastliness that it's got going on is more than anything else the
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fact that it supports triple over voltage so that means you can actually
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overvolt the GPU core unlike a reference
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GTX 680 this enables better overclocking
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and better stability and it also runs cool due to the fact that it's got the
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awesome full card back plate as well as again all the heat pipes and the beastly
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cooler that it's got going on I should run you through the rest of the testbench so we've got crucial
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ballistics tactical Tracer DDR3 memory going on in here which looks amazing
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there's those uh pwm phases for the motherboard that light up when it's
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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
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big bang board so I'm sorry I can't get you guys a better view of that we're
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using a simple air cooler from be quiet! it's not even particularly loud and
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we've got an ocz ZT 750 W power supply
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and we're running off of a mushkin Kronos Deluxe
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SSD so the configurations we'll be testing are stock 3770k with a stock
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gtx680 versus what we get with our quick
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overclock on the 3770k with the OC certified board and our maximum
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overclock we were able to achieve on the GTX 680 lightning edition see what we
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gain from a few minutes of overclocking for tests we'll be keeping it really
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simple crisis 2 The Elder Scrolls Skyrim
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and doing a 1 gig video output test converting to Windows
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media video and rendering so at non
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overclocked stock settings as well as
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with the overclocked CPU it's not overclocked now and the overclocked
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lightning GTX 680 so it's conclusion
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time and just for a lark I'm going to experiment with overlaying my
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performance graphs instead of just talking about them and pointing the
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camera at them so basically this test
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system is pretty beast and what benefit do we get from having our overclocked
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graphics card and overclocked CPU well the answer is it depends on the
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situation so for example in crisis 2 you can see the performance difference
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between our overclock system and our non- overclock system is only about 2 to
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10% so what this tells me because most of our overclocking was done with the
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Empower motherboard is that crisis 2 was not particularly CPU limited so
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fascinating so the GPU was more of a factor holding it back and the GPU clock
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speeds um didn't make that much of a difference so it's possible that the
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difference in performance could be more to do with the memory the lightning edition card didn't overclock that much
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on the memory only a few mehz so once we
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moved on to Skyrim you can see we see a significant performance difference about
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15 to 20% depending on whether you look at the
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minimum or the average frame rates that means that this overclocked certified
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quick overclock that we did is yielding us an enormous gain in performance that
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usually is reserved for upgrading to to an additional CPU now can you achieve
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this overclock on something other than a big bang z77 M Power the answer is
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probably you can however this one is
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validated and this one is ready to go so it's pretty much guaranteed out of the
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box as long as you don't get a total dud CPU now for our quick video rendering
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test we saw a 10% Improvement in performance so that indicates to me that
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the CPU is faster and we will therefore or save time if we are doing anything
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CPU intensive so in conclusion there's
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not much going on here in terms of the
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unexpected Intel CPUs are fast overclocking makes them faster and I
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hope you guys have found this to be educational and informative um especially about MSI's
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new OC certified concept don't forget to
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