MSI Z77A-GD65 Review: Military Class for Ivy Bridge

[siopao1984]

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Taiwan based MSI (also known as Micro-Star International), is one of the world's largest makers of computer motherboards and video cards. Together with fellow early pioneers ASUS and Gigabyte, the three companies have been battling at the top since the early days for the mindshare and wallets of system integrators and DIY builders.Today we look at the MSI Z77A-GD65, a mainstream ATX board that is positioned below their premium GD80 offering. Although Intel Z77 Panther Point based offerings have been released for almost one quarter already, most of us enthusiasts have got the impression the manufacturers have only finally sorted out their pesky BIOS firmware bugs, especially when it comes to overclocking.

The packaging of the Z77A-GD65 is typical of MSI's recent box designs, with the manufacturer keen to stress the durability credentials of its "Military Class III" components.

Accessories wise we get the standard SATA cables and I/O shield, as well as a single SLi ribbon connector and wires for connecting to the voltage probe points on the motherboard.

Here we have the block diagram of the Z77 platform, key improvements over the previous 6-series generation being PCIe 3.0 and native USB 3.0 support.

Read more: MSI Z77A-GD65 Review: Military Class for Ivy Bridge by VR-Zone.com

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The Z77A-GD65's back i/o panel can be described as minimalist but adequate. MSI chose not to deploy additional 3rd party controllers, so we get only four USB 2.0/two USB 3.0 ports which is serviced by the Z77 PCH. There is also triple display (Analog, DVI and HDMI) and the inclusion of a legacy PS/2 port, clearly aimed at overclockers in mind wanting to conserve every available CPU interrupt for the benchmarks.



Gigabit Ethernet connectivity is handled by an no-frills Intel 82579V PHY, a welcome choice over other mediocre Realtek and Marvell controllers of yesteryears.





Finally, the integrated audio is from a bog standard Realtek ALC898 codec, quite a common sight on the current generation of boards in the market. MSI has also bundled Creative's THX TruStudio PRO software suite with the board, which should provide some aural voodoo.





At the other end of the board, there is a right angled USB 3.0 connector and eight SATA ports, four of them of the 6Gb/s variety.





The Z77A-GD65 proves its enthusiast credentials with the inclusion of a PORT-80h diagnostic display and dual BIOS, which is useful for experimentation.





Like most other Z77 offerings, the MSI board has three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, capable of single x16 or x8+x8 or x8+x4+x4 operation when used with a Ivy Bridge processor.







Surprisingly all three PCIe x16 slots have full x16 solder points behind. We didn't spot anything prone to electrical shorts when mounted in a tight case.

[siopao1984]

In this section we will explore the action in and around the LOTES LGA1155 socket.



The motherboard is cooled with a small heatsink for the PCH and a blue heatpipe cooler for the MOSFETs.





CPU voltage regulation is serviced by a space saving 11 phase Renasas Driver MOS (R2J20655BNP), each capable of 35A below 100 degrees celcius and switching at 1000Hz. The use of Super Ferrite Chokes and Hi-C capacitors is also said to bring higher efficiencies and longer lifespan.







uPI semiconductor's uP1618A (6+2 Phase Buck Controller)





As expected from an enthusiast motherboard, there are voltage probe points for reading the common overclocking variables and onboard power/reset switches. If you are not into fine-tuning your system, the "OC Genie II" button should automatically set a conservative overclock when activated.





When the system is in operation, there are LED lights indicating the number of power phases in use.

[siopao1984]

BIOS

Since the Sandy Bridge/P67 era, MSI has deployed an interactive "Click BIOS" UEFi GUI interface for their bios thats allows the use of the mouse and other advanced features like taking screenshots, loading/saving profiles and an integrated web browser. We felt that the screen real estate could still be better utilized (like on recent ASUS/Gigabyte boards) and some option labels made less ambiguous. Overall, it was responsive and didn't cause our testers much frustration.









Software



Central to the Z77A-GD65 is MSI's Control Center utility, a palatable 8MB utility which offers all the essential overclocking knobs and information in a non-nonsense fashion.



Other than the THX TruStudio Pro that we've mentioned early, MSI also included the Lucid VIRTU MVP software which improves performance in certain benchmarks and games.



Overclocking (AUTO)

With a Core i5-3570K and 2 x 8GB G.Skill 2400MHz DDR3 kit installed, the auto overclocking feature took us to a conservative 4.2GHz and only 2133Mhz on the rams (strange that it didn't use XMP support).

[siopao1984]

Test setup



CPU:
Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.8GHz 1.28V (linpack stable)

Motherboards:
ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe
MSI Z77A-GD65
Intel DZ77GA-70K

Memory:
G.Skills RipJawsZ 2133MHz DDR3 16GB Kit

Power Supply:
Cooler Master Silent M Power 1000W

Storage:
OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition 240GB (SATA)
Kingston V100+ 96GB (USB)

Graphics Cards / Drivers:
8.970 beta drivers:
2 x AMD Radeon 7970 3GB

Operating System:
Windows 7 SP1 with latest patches

We ran all our benchmarks with the CPU overclocked at 4.8GHz because benchmarks complete faster and no rational person buys an unlocked processor to run it at stock. All latency inducing power saving options were turned off and the latest drivers for every component was used.



Benchmarks

The differences between Z77 boards you see in the performance figures below are down to the optimization of the electrical traces on the PCB, quality of components used and BIOS firmware.



CPU/Memory Tests

[siopao1984]

Benchmarks

The differences between Z77 boards you see in the performance figures below are down to the optimization of the electrical traces on the PCB, quality of components used and BIOS firmware.

Multi-GPU PCIe Performance (Radeon 7970 CFX)


















SATA 3.0 Controller Tests





USB 3.0 Performance

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Power Consumption







DPC Latency

DPC Latency is induced by broken hardware or shoddy coded drivers/energy saving nonsense which cause audio/video drop-outs of real-time data like video streaming or FPS gaming. The MSI Z77A-GD65 performed well here.





CPU Load Line Calibration

Loadline calibration is the mitigation of voltage drops, which affects full load stability during overclocking. Most older VRM implementations struggle in this test, but the MSI Z77A-GD65 survived. In this case we used the +87.5% setting in the BIOS, which doesn't cause voltage to overshoot the desired value (1.25v) and kept the overclock stable. We hooked up a multimeter when the stress test was running and hardly noticed any drop in the voltage reading.

[siopao1984]

Conclusion



The MSI Z77A-GD65 is quite a decent performer, with benchmark figures close to the top and sometimes demostrating better CPU efficiencies than the other systems in our test suite.

However, we've found with a current price tag of US$176 (Newegg) / SGD$315 (Cybermind), it competes directly with ASUS's P8Z77-V (US$179 / SGD$289), Gigabyte's Z77X-UD5H (US$179) and ASRock's Z77 Extreme6 (US$174 / SGD$319), all of them have better bundles (e.g. Dual LAN, Wifi and mSATA) and more USB 3.0 ports to boot.

Don't get us wrong we feel that the Z77A-GD65 is a decent and stable motherboard. If there is a price revision downwards of say US$30 / SGD $50, the value proposition of the product will look much better in the face of aggressive competition offerings.



Pros
Good PCB layout/design
Voltage Check points
Stripped down for overclocking (no extra host controllers, less CPU interrupts)
Right angle internal USB 3.0 connector
Military Class III components

Cons
Cluttered BIOS layout
Unattractive Price Tag
Realtek audio

[Fafnir]

really ugly VRM heatsinks :S

[acronis]

asa naman ang itx nga z77?