Test Setup
In a completely different approach, MSI has sent us an entire gaming setup complete from the rig to the peripherals. We’ll ignore everything else and focus on the core of the system.
Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K (OC’d to 4.6Ghz)
Motherboard: MSI Big Bang Z77 Mpower
Memory: Kingston HyperX T1 2133 4GBx2
Storage: Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 90GB
PSU: Antec TruePower Quattro 1200w
Cooling: ThermalTake Frio Advanced
Case: Custom-made acrylic display case
Monitor: Hanns-G 24″
VGA:Â MSI N670 Power Edition 2GB
Here’s a picture of the test rig in question:
PERFORMANCE vs. Z77 Motherboards
Here we check out the Z77 Mpower versus other Z77 boards.
SiSoft’s SANDRA is a benchmarking, testing and system information application which provides plenty of options in gaining information regarding your system. For this test, we gauge the raw computational power of the CPU with the Processor Arithmetic benchmark based on the Whetstone and Dhrystone test. Both tests run completely within the processor so it gives a good picture of how a processor performs.
wPrime is a multi-threaded benchmarking application designed to measure the raw computational power of a CPU. It can be configured to run on a custom number of threads to accommodate multi-core CPUs.
Maxon offers a nice benchmark tool called Cinebench which really stresses your entire system to render a very complex scene. The output score is completely unique to Cinebench but allows us to have a rough idea of how the CPU works with 3D rendering tasks.
SuperPI is another benchmarking tool that utilizes the pure computational power of a CPU. This test however is purely single-threaded and shows us the performance of a single core which gives us a good picture of how a processor performs on similar tasks.
At a glance: Overall performance is solid, and stacks up in the upper-end of the graphs. Even more impressive is that overclocking the system gave us more remarkable results placing the MSI system in our top spot. We did however find that the SuperPI results isn’t as we’d expected as the system uses DDR3-2133 instead of our usual 2400 which has adversely impacted the results. We’ll go into further details regarding this later in our overclock section.