MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Motherboard Review

MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series Overclocking

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

The Intel Core i7 3770K utilizes a Bclk of 100MHz, under full load the Intel Core i7 3770K uses a multiplier of x35 to achieve the final clock speed of 3.5GHz. Since we are using a K series processor which has an unlocked multiplier we will be able to increase the default x35 multiplier to achieve our overclock today. The Intel Core i7 3770K has a turbo multiplier of x39 which will cause the system to run at 3900MHz (100MHz x 39) with a lightly threaded application.

One of the key points of the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming Series motherboard is the OC Genie II. This is an automatic method to overclocking the processor. Once we depressed the MSI OC Genie II button on the motherboard and booted the system up we found that our Intel Core i7 3770K was now running at 4.2GHz. From previous experience with the Intel Core i7 3770K processor we know that this is a rather conservative overclock. Though MSI does have to keep the automatic overclocking a little on the safe side due to the heat that can be generated by an overclocked processor.

We obviously weren’t going to only use the OC Genie II on the Z77A-GD65 Gaming motherboard, so we stuck our heads into the UEFI BIOS and began to manually overclock the I7 3770K processor. Within a short time we found ourselves with a solid overclock at 4.8GHz! We set the multiplier to x48 and the CPU VCore to 1.3V and we were golden.