OVERCLOCKING
OC’ing at a glance:Â The system competes heavily with other OC-oriented boards we’ve tested but falls just a hair short of taking the #1 spot. Still, it manages to chug nicely with the base clock OC. Going back to what we’ve mentioned earlier, DDR3-2400 has issues with this board. This is not the first time we’ve encountered this and we felt a BIOS update could remedy the situation but it did not. Sad to say we were not able to product results using DDR3-2400 for this board so it gets no marks for the Memory OC tests as we’ve expected a board of this calibre to readily accept such configurations. Avexir Core Series DDR3-2400 as well as Kingston HyperX T1 and Predator modules we’re also tested to no avail.
MSI seems to take pride in their overclocking prowess and the Z77 Mpower and N670 Power Edition are no exception. MSI arms their products to the teeth with Military Class components potentially giving them superb OC potential. Aside from this, MSI’s OC Genie function makes it so that anyone can overclock their systems with a touch of a button making the entire OC process irrelevant to uninterested people who just want a quick boost in their setup.
Above you can see the boost we’ve achieved from using the OC Genie feature. This may not be spectacular to the overclocking aficionado but anyone who is yet to be initiated in the overclocking scene will appreciate the ease that these figures were achieved. Furthermore, MSI’s OC Genie function makes sure the system is in a very stable state reducing the risk of an unstable system after using the feature.
Now we go back to our manual overclock gauntlet and see how the Z77 Mpower stacks up.
We mentioned stability above and this is something that most newbies to overclocking tend to be so concerned about. After all, an unstable system suggests something is wrong and that can ultimately lead to something broken. People don’t like broken stuff. Going back to what MSI did a couple of months ago during the Z77 Mpower, we have taken our test system and put it into our own torture test. We left the open-air system in a room with poor airflow with ambient temps hovering around 28*C-31*C, we take our system to absolute extremes:
We ran the system for 40 hours, 16 hours more than MSI’s Change the Game of Overclocking tour around Taiwan. We can see the processor throttle up to 10% but the graph, updated at 60-second intervals, shows us the system doesn’t dip much and only throttles when temps go in the upper 105*C. We felt the system can take much more with a more powerful cooling solution but this alone speaks for the stability of the MSI Z77 Mpower. Note that the case itself doesn’t provide much airflow, we intended it that way.
Over in the GPU-side, we clocked-up the N670 PE to 1085/1552 with a boost clock of 1163Mhz from 1020/1502/1098Mhz. As MSI’s Afterburner utility is our choice of GPU OC tool, we’d again like to stress the handiness of this tool. For this round, we do it differently though. Instead of crunching some stress test  we decided to use the overclocked condition in our gaming test.