CPUs & Motherboards

MSI Z77A-GD65 Review

vortez
April 23, 2012 18 Min Read
3 0

We take a look at one of MSI’s high-end Intel Z77 offerings and see how it handles Ivy Bridge – reviewed with Intel Core i5-3570K.


Reviewed with Intel Core i5-3570K (Ivy Bridge)


Product on Review: Z77A-GD65


Manufacturer and Sponsor: MSI
Street Price: £150

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past month you will be aware that Intel released their latest Z77 chipset for LGA1155 to work in unity with their new 3rd Generation of CPUs – Ivy Bridge. Due to the chipset being launched early and the CPUs only today we have been restrained from revealing Z77’s true potential.

Some of you may have seen the onslaught of Z77 reviews around the web from review sites choosing to use Sandy Bridge with Z77 but rather than have to re-review all of the motherboards with this new chipset and effectively waste time it is only today that we are pushing out the reviews in this sector. It can almost be guaranteed that an overwhelming number of users will be upgrading to Z77 for Ivy Bridge support so why bother reviewing with Sandy Bridge? It makes no sense to us, the reader wants to see the FULL potential of Z77 and Ivy Bridge, so that’s what we are going to show!

So today we shall be looking at MSI’s high-end Z77A-GD65, a motherboard with a wealth of features such as Military Class III components, OC Genie II and a BIOS with a luscious GUI that could have you spending more time in there than Windows itself. So let’s begin our analysis of this new motherboard under Ivy Bridge.



About MSI (In their own words)
MSI is proud of its more than 20 years experience in designing and manufacturing high performance IT products. The product lines of MSI are mainboards, graphic cards, notebooks, consumer electronics, barebones, networking and server products, and fully integrated add-on peripherals. With its ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 qualified facilities, MSI products provide the best performance, reliability and value-increasing productivity.

We distribute our products through offices located in The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Turkey, Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, United States, Canada, Mexico, Latin America, Brazil, Taiwan, Japan, China, Korea, India and Australia. MSI markets its products to distributors, computer system manufacturers, and system integrators. For more information about the company go to http://www.msi.com

Technical Specifications


CPU

• Supports 3rd Gen Intel® Core™ i7 / Core™ i5 / Core™ i3 / Pentium® / Celeron® processors for LGA 1155 socket
Please refer to CPU Support for compatible CPU; the above description is for reference only.

Chipset

• Intel® Z77 Chipset

Main Memory

• Support four DDR3 DIMMs 2667*(OC)/ 2400*(OC)/ 2133*(OC)/ 1866*(OC)/1600/ 1333/ 1066 DRAM (32GB Max)
– Supports Dual-Channel mode

Slots

• 3 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots
• 4 x PCIe 2.0 x1 slots

On-Board SATA

• SATAIII controller integrated in Intel® Z77 chipset
– Up to 6Gb/s transfer speed.
– Supports two SATA ports (SATA1~2) by Z77

• SATAIII controller integrated in ASMedia® ASM 1061 chipset
– Up to 6Gb/s transfer speed.
– Supports two SATA ports (SATA7~8) by ASM 1061
(If you set external SATA 6Gb/s ports to AHCI mode, we highly recommend that you install Windows 7.)

• SATAII controller integrated in Intel® Z77 chipset
– Up to 3Gb/s transfer speed.
– Supports four SATA ports (SATA3~6)

• RAID
– SATA1~6 ports support Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise (AHCI / RAID 0/1/5/10) by Intel Z77

USB 3.0

• 2 USB 3.0 rear I/O ports by Intel® Z77
• 2 USB 3.0 onboard connector by Intel® Z77

Audio

• Chipset integrated by Realtek® ALC898
– Flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing
– Compliant with Azalia 1.0 Spec

LAN

• Supports one PCI Express LAN 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Intel® 82579V

Multi-GPU

• Supports ATI® CrossFire™ Technology
• Supports NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology
• Supports Lucid® Virtu Universal MVP

Internal I/O Connectors

– 3 x USB 2.0 connectors
– 1 x USB 3.0 connector
– 1 x IEEE 1394 connector
– 1 x Multi BIOS Switch
– 1 x TPM Module connector
– 1 x Front Panel connector
– 1 x Front Panel Audio connector
– 1 x Chassis Intrusion connector
– 1 x Voice Genie connector (optional)
– 1 x MultiConnect Panel connector (optional)
– 1 x V-Check Points Set
– 1 x Power button
– 1 x OC Genie button
– 1 x Reset button
– 1 x Clear CMOS jumper
– CPU x 1 / System x 4 FAN connectors

Back Panel I/O Ports

– 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
– 1 x Clear CMOS button
– 1 x Coaxial S/PDIF-out port
– 1 x Optical S/PDIF-out port
– 4 x USB 2.0 ports
– 2 x USB 3.0 ports
– 1 x RJ45 LAN jack
– 1 x 6 in 1 audio jack
– 1 x HDMI® port with max. resolution up to 1920×1200 @60Hz
– 1 x DVI-D port with max. resolution up to 1920×1200 @60Hz
– 1 x VGA port with max. resolution up to 2048×1536 @75Hz

BIOS

• The mainboard BIOS provides “Plug & Play” BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically.
• The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications.

Dimension

• 30.5cm(L) x 24.5cm(W) ATX Form Factor

Mounting

• 9 mounting hole

Packaging & First Look


GD65 is presented in a rather eye-catching box – Military Class III being the main focus. Features such as Click BIOS II and OC Genie are also placed on the front. MSI go through these features in some details on the reverse of the box.

Inside the box there are a number of included accessories that consist of:

• Documentation – Manual, Software Guide, Quick Install Guide, MCIII Certificate
• Software CD – Drivers and Utilities
• 4x SATA 6Gbps cables
• IO Shield
• NVIDIA SLI Bridge (flexible)
• Quick connect

For a full unbox and look at these accessories take a look at our MSI Z77A-GD65 Video Review.


MSI Z77A-GD65 packaging



Bundled accessories with Z77A-GD65


With the packaging out of the way we can finally see an overview of the motherboard itself. GD65 has a black/brown PCB with black and blue slots and ports. The heatsink design for the MOSFETs and Z77 chip are very pleasing to the eye and the general aesthetics of this motherboard are very good. My personal feelings are that this is one of MSI’s best designs yet.


An overview of Z77A-GD65


Over the page we will take a good, close, look at all of GD65’s features.

Closer Look


Beginning at the CPU socket area we will take a closer look at the various aspects of GD-65. Being a Z77 motherboard the socket here is LGA1155 and has compatibility for Intel’s 2nd and 3rd Generation of CPUs (Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge).

MSI have chosen to go with two rather large heatsinks to cover the MOSFETs – these heatsinks have a single heatpipe connecting them. It’s worth noting that these heatsinks are significantly larger than what other vendors have used. MSI are using a 10 + 2 phase power design with Military Class III components around the CPU socket including SFCs and Hi-C CAPs. Next to the heatsinks is an 8-pin CPU power socket.


Substantial heatsinks covering the MOSFETs


Moving to the memory slots – there is support for dual channel DDR3 from 1066MHz up to a phenomenal 2667MHz (OC). In the corner MSI have chosen to place the onboard power, reset and OC Genie II buttons. These buttons are extremely useful for those who plan to use their system outside of the typical computer chassis.

The OC Genie II button meanwhile allows for an instantaneous boost to a pre-defined overclock frequency specified in the BIOS. This frequency can be completely customised to the desire setting. For a living example of how this works check out our MSI OC Genie II Demo.

Next to these buttons is a small blue connection hub – these are the Voltage Check Points and allow various voltages to be read on-the-fly via a multi-meter. This type of feature is generally used by advanced users.


Numerous features around the memory slots


Z77A-GD65 has a variety of SATA storage ports. These include SATA 2 (3Gbps) and SATA 3 (6Gbps). From left to right – two SATA 3 – 6Gbps ports (White) supplied via ASMedia (ASM 1061), four SATA 2 – 3Gbps ports (Black) supplied via Intel Z77 and another two SATA 3 6Gbps (White) but supplied via Intel Z77. On the far right there is a native USB 3.0 port for front panel connectivity on the computer case.


SATA 2 and SATA 3 storage ports


Over on the other side of these storage ports are even more features. There are an additional 3x USB 2.0 headers and some other interesting things too. Dr Debug has its place on GD65 – if you aren’t familiar with this feature, the LED panel displays various codes as you boot beyond POST and into Windows. A particular code will display if you are having specific issues with a particular component such as memory and then referring back to the user manual with this code helps to identify what is wrong with the system so that you can be on your way to a solution. Immediately next to this are two BIOS chips and a BIOS switch, giving you the ability to boot to different BIOS – especially useful if you are overclocking and come into problems upon boot.

Behind all of these features is a large heatsink covering the Z77 chip. This heatsink covers a wide space but is short so that there are no problems with graphics card compatibility.


Dual BIOS with switch plus DrDebug


Turning our attention to the area that most will be interested in, the PCI-E section – we see a variety of slots. The 4x black slots are PCI-E 2.0 x1 whilst the 3x blue slots are PCI-E 3.0 with support for NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire. The top slot is x16 whilst slot two is x8 and slot 3 is x4. If you are using a single graphics card then it’s advisable to use the top slot but if you are using multiple graphics cards then this will drop down to x8 with 2-way SLI and Crossfire or x4 with 3-way SLI/Crossfire.


PCI-E 3.0 slots with support for NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire


Lastly we come to the rear IO ports. Here there is again a selection of different ports to use, including:

• PS2 keyboard/mouse
• 2x USB 2.0 ports
• Reset CMOS button
• Optical and coaxial SPD/IF
• 2x USB 2.0 ports
• HDMI/VGA/DVI display ports
• 8-Channel audio jacks with support from THX TruStudio PRO


The rear IO on GD65

Test Setup & Overclocking


CPUs Intel Core i5 3570K (3.40GHz) Ivy Bridge
Cooling Alpenfohn K2 – Mount Doom
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Memory Corsair Vengeance 8GB 2133MHz CL11 DDR
Graphics XFX R7970 Black Edition
Storage Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
PSU OCZ Fatal1ty 750W



Benchmarks

Cinebench 11.5 – CPU Score
x264 HD 4.0 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware SANDRA 2012 – CPU & Memory benchmarks
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
3DMark 11 – DX11 3D Performance and Extreme preset
Games – DIRT 3, Skyrim and Battlefield 3

Other Software
Core Temp
LinX stress Test
CPU-Z

Overclocking

As previously mentioned in our Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge Roundup – overclocking with Ivy Bridge is identical to Sandy Bridge. It is achieved by altering the multiplier rather than the BCLK. So the BCLK stays at 100MHz and the multiplier is modified. So if we have 100MHz on the BCLK and 40 for the multiplier this will obviously output 4GHz.

For this section of the review the maximum overclock was achieved by using the Intel Core i5 3750K and monolith CPU cooler – Alpenfohn K2 with 2x 120mm and 1x 140mm fans. The multiplier for Core i5-3570K was nudged up in small increments starting with 43 and upon booting into windows LinX was run 5 times in order to observe temperatures and confirm stability.

The 3750K managed to overclock up to 48 – 4.8GHz from 3.40GHz, a 41% overclock. This is a significant increase and required 1.38 vcore and PLL overvoltage enabled. I pushed for the 5GHz milestone but sadly the temperatures increased far too high under load when nudging up vcore to achieve such a frequency. The temperatures rose to over 90*C.



This maximum overclock will be used throughout our benchmarks – as well as stock 3570K frequency with turbo boost enabled.

MSI Z77A-GD65 BIOS & OC Genie II


For this review we have produced a video to give a guided tour of the BIOS – revealing key features and also showing how OC Genie II works. The video is below – we hope you like it!

Power Consumption

It’s interesting to note the power consumption across all motherboards. Although they are using P67 and Z68 chipsets, energy results can fluctuate between manufacturers due to the features and specifications that are integrated. First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed – the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use and then the system is loaded with 3DMark 11 – watts are again monitored for the duration of the test and the highest rated wattage result is then noted down. Below are the results of this energy test.




Lucid VIRTU MVP


An interesting feature that first appeared on the desktop environment with the Sandy Bridge architecture was the integrated graphics on the CPU. This meant that regardless of if you had a discreet graphics solution you always had the ability to use “Built in” processing power to watch movies, view 3D content and take part in some casual gaming.

With Ivy Bridge, Intel have stepped up with new graphics architecture by delivering full DX11 functionality. With HD-4000 there is a significant increase in execution units which mean even greater performance enhancements when compared to HD 2000/3000 – found on Sandy Bridge CPUs. To the end user this should translate to being able to handle 1080p movies, more complex gaming titles and even more intense 3D renders.

The GD65 has HDMI/VGA/DVI ports to allow connectivity to Intel’s IGP with support via Lucid VIRTU MVP. What VIRTU does is – it allows the user to utilise both discrete GPU and Intel’s IGP (built in graphics on the CPU) without the need to change hardware or switch the outputs.

VIRTU brings in many unique features, a great deal of them are associated with power management – relating to heat, fan speed, and other useful elements. There are two different modes to use when considering VIRTU:

i-Mode
This provides the user with Intel features and power saving options when not being used for 3D gaming. Display must be connected to video output on the motherboard to use this feature.

d-Mode
This mode allows gamers to enhance their 3D experience and performance – combining a discrete graphics solution and the iGPU. In this mode we can use VIRTU to assist with things like transcoding and media encoding in general. The overriding thought on this is that even entry level AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards have their own technologies for handling media encoding such as AMD Stream and NVIDIA CUDA – both of these technologies are deemed as being exceptional alternatives and don’t offer any real advantage over VIRTU using IGP for these types of task.

Display drivers for discreet graphics card must be installed prior to VIRTU drivers.


For more information on VIRTU please go to: Lucidlogix Virtu MVP

Encoding Performance – X264 HD

Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.

x264 HD gives results for 2 passes when compressing an MPEG-2 clip into x264. It presents 4 separate results for each pass giving a total of 8 – all results are given in FPS. For each pass I have averaged out the results.



Processing Features Performance – AIDA64

Get your copy of AIDA64 here!

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.








Processing Power Performance – Cinebench

CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.


Bandwidth Performance – SiSoftware SANDRA

SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU and memory tests.














3D Performance – 3DMARK 11

Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

3DMark 11 is a very popular 3D performance benchmark suite and needs little introduction. For the test settings both Performance and Extreme presets are run with ‘benchmark only’ being selected. This provides good analysis. Many will only test the performance preset, using the extreme mode we can examine the board under much more severe stressing – at 720p and 1080p.





Gaming Performance – DIRT 3, Skyrim & Battlefield 3

It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because gamers will want to know if there are any significant benefits. So here we have a selection of popular gaming titles, critically acclaimed and action-packed.

Settings
DIRT 3
– 1680×1050 4xMSAA – Ultra Quality *Benchmark tool*
Skyrim
– 1680×1050 2xAA – Very High Quality *FRAPS – 1st episode*
Battlefield 3
– 1680×1050 2xAA – Ultra Quality *FRAPS – Sepur Fedelis*

The gaming titles selected demand GPU power over CPU power – in each test the difference is rather marginal.





Conclusion


Ever since the Z77A-GD65 arrived I have been keen to share my thoughts on this delightful offering from MSI. Those reading this will have undoubtedly read various Z77 motherboard reviews around the web already; we have held back any reviews as we decided it would be in the readers best interest to analyse all Z77 motherboards using Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs rather than Sandy Bridge as most media have done already – this makes much more sense, Z77 is designed for Ivy Bridge and as is always the case, we want to give the reader the most complete and fulfilling review rather than just publishing an article to pull in view counts!

So where do we stand with GD65? Well, it’s simply one of the best options currently available for Intel Z77/Ivy Bridge. The benchmarks may have revealed that this motherboard isn’t the best at stock speeds but the results are only marginal when you look at them more closely and it isn’t just about performance related results that makes a product the cream of the crop.



GD65’s feature-set is what sets this motherboard apart. Enthusiasts will appreciate the clean, sleek and refined aesthetics on outside with a stunning black and blue appearance and Military Class III components to compliment which provide added reliability and longevity. Under the hood MSI’s BIOS is simply outstanding. Tweaking settings and getting that all important overclock has never been as exciting and now that MSI have refined their GUI and removed glitches – users can now use their favourite gaming mouse without suffering incompatibilities or navigation lag as per our Z77A-GD65 BIOS Video

Overclocking our Ivy Bridge 3750K to 4.8GHz revealed some significant benefits across a large spectrum of environments and altering the multiplier in the BIOS causes various safety features (that would otherwise prevent an overclock) to disable making it even easier to get that frequency nudged up.

Pricing sits at around £150 for the Z77A-GD65 which is actually very good for such a high-end offering. Overall, I’ve been very impressed with this motherboard and as a result it comes highly recommended with an Editor’s Choice award as well as scoring Gold.



Pros
+ Sleek and refined aesthetics
+ Premium components (Military Class III)
+ High-end feature-set
+ Overclocking is easy and yields great results
+ The best BIOS currently on the market
+ OC Genie II is very handy and easy to use

Cons
– Stock performance falls slightly behind other rivals


Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

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