| MSI Z77A-GD65 LGA1155 Motherboard |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Saturday, 07 April 2012 | |
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Page 6 of 18
Motherboard Testing MethodologySince the Z77 chipset is the successor to the Z68, I tested the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard against my favorite Z68 motherboard, the ASUS P8Z68V-Pro. I used an Intel Core i5-2500K processor in both motherboards, and both test setups used the same memory, hard drive, CPU cooler, and video card...the motherboard was the only thing that was different. For the MSI Z77 motherboard, I tested the performance at stock CPU speeds, as well as the automatic overclock applied via MSI's "OC Genie II" and the best overclock I could achieve "by hand." Although the board supports Lucid Virtu MVP GPU virtualization, all benchmarks in this section were run with the AMD Radeon 6850 card, since using the Sandy Bridge integrated GPU takes some cache from the CPU cores as well as bandwidth from main memory. Intel Z68 Express Test Platform
Intel Z77 Express Test Platform
Benchmark Applications
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Comments
I try OC but when Windows starts up, my computer just stops in the loading Screen for windows....
Same if i use OC-genie
And sometimes it appear a2 in right bottom corner on the screen (rest is black)
My computer specs:
I7-3770K Intel prosessor
MSI z77a-gd65 motherboard
H100 cpu cooling (corsair)
12GB ram Dominator GT / ram fan (corsair)
MSI hd r6800 series HAWK
And i got a H2Go case from MountainMods.com
Im crossing my fingers :P
1. This is true of ANY Z67/Z68/Z77 motherboard except high-end boards with PLX chips. You've only got 16 PCI-E lanes from the CPU, so provisioning 2 x16 slots is impossible without extra hardware.
2. If you're using an Ivy Bridge chip, you've got PCI-E 3.0 lanes with twice the bandwidth as PCI-E 2.0 lanes, so those two x8 slots are the equivalent of two x16 slots if you're using a PCI-E 3.0 compliant graphics card.
3. But even if you're running Sandy Bridge CPU and older graphics cards, guess what? Nothing out there saturates 8 PCI-E lanes anyway, so games won't play one FPS slower on a 2x8 SLI or Crossfire system than they would on a 2x16 system.
But if you want to spend extra money, yes, there are many LGA1155 motherboard that can supply 2x16: ASUS Maximum V Extreme, ASUS P8Z77-WS, ASUS P8Z77-V Premium; EVGA Z77 FTW. MSI doesn't seem to have any boards like this, but again, unless you're running triple or quad cards, you don't really need a board with a PLX chip.