Overclocking Results
Most high-end motherboards include numerous overclocking options for beginners and experienced enthusiasts. The Z68A-GD80 takes advantage of MSI’s OC Genie II technology that simpifies overclocking to a simple push of a button on the PCB. OC Genie II takes the CPU ratio, CPU voltage, and XMP into consideration when it overclocks Sandy Bridge processors that are limited by locked-down base clocks.
Achieved 4.2GHz overclock by clicking OC Genie II button on PCB
There are two main options for overclocking the Z68A-GD80 – using the OC Genie II button and manual overclocking your hardware in MSI’s Click BIOS II. As you can see in the screenshot above, we began our overclocking analysis by pushing the OC Genie II button on the PCB and booted our test system into Windows 7. The first thing we saw on the screen was that OC Genie II was enabled and that it wasn’t recommended to disable OC Genie II in the BIOS. After 30 seconds, we were welcomed by the Windows 7 desktop and we immediately opened CPU-Z to check our current processor speeds. Our i5-2500K was humming along at 4.2GHz right out of the gate, and we confirmed the stability over overclock using Cinebench 11.5.
During the manual overclocking portion of our review, we went into MSI’s Click BIOS II and made the following changes under OC Menu before we started overclocking our i5-2500K processor using the P67A-GD80:
- Left BCLK frequency at 100
- Increase CPU Ratio (The math for overclocking our i5-2500K is very simple because we just multiply the BCLK frequency (100) and the CPU Ratio (currently 45) to get the overall CPU speed (4.5GHz)
- Increased CPU voltage to 1.4v
After making the changes above in the BIOS, I began incrementally increasing the CPU ratio to test how far the i5-2500K could go. I continued to increase the CPU ratio to 49x before I we had our first BSOD and system crash. After backing it down a bit, we were able to get a stable 4.789GHz overclock. This is the highest overclock we’ve had with this processor and is a 68.9 percent increase over the CPU’s stock settings.
This screenshot was taken when we achieved a 4.789GHz overclock on the MSI Z68A-GD80
| CPU Speed | BCLK | CPU Multiplier | DRAM Frequency | DRAM Timings | CPU Voltage |
| 4.789GHz | 99.8MHz |
48x |
1330.4 MHz | 9-9-9-24 1T | 1.392v |
Overclocking Results
Nice board and all. But it’s
Nice board and all. But it’s $240 compared to $180 I paid for a P67A-GD65 7 months ago.
Surely the Virtu folks want to get paid, and Intel probably charges a bit extra for a Z68 compared to the P67, but as the consumer I don’t ask *why*, I just see the price tag.
The board is not $60 faster. If one really needs the Z68 features, well then this is a great choice. I just think the pricing isn’t good for the level of performance.
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That $240 price (at least, in
That $240 price (at least, in the US) is for the B3 version, which is being replaced by the G3 reviewed here. I’m not sure why the price is higher, unless it’s due to odd supply/demand.
The Z68A-GD80 G3 is around $220 from most resellers, but MSI also has the Z68A-GD65 G3 for people who are in the sub-$200 range; it is priced around $180 and is still an enthusiast class board.
Currently, I’m running a Gigabyte board. However, I am interested in seeing what MSI has up their sleeve with their upcoming X79 and 7-series chipset boards. I’ve had some good boards from them in the past, and it looks like they are making improvements to their Gen-1 UEFI BIOS with ClickBIOS II, which is very welcome.
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