MSI X79A-GD65 X79 Motherboard Review

Now that we’re armed with our C2 stepping processor, we were keen to take a look at how things overclock and most boards allowed us for a stable 4.8GHz, but being MSI, we assumed that it had a bit more to give. First thing was first, to see how easy the chip could be pushed to 4.6GHz for our comparison testing, and this was a breeze to achieve with little settings needing to be changed. We then tried for 4.8GHz and once again, things were fairly simple, with a few other select options needing to be tweaked. With a good 4.8GHz laid out in front of us, we wanted to aim for that magical 5GHz to show that the GD65 from MSI really can compete with the best in the business.

After speaking to MSI and altering both the multiplier and bus speed, we finally managed to settle on 5040MHz with use of the 48x multiplier and a 105MHz bus speed at a fairly low 1.5V. We say low, purely because we’ve seen other boards require a little more juice to get to the magical 5GHz number we saw today.

We made sure that everything was stable at this speed, and that of course; temperatures were within a reasonable range of what we’re acceptable with and once it had proved to be stable, we aimed to push things even higher.

Sadly, no matter how many settings you tweaked, or how many extra volts were chucked at it, this chip did not want to go above 5040MHz, through use of the BCLK or the multiplier, but with a 5GHz overclock at 1.5V, we certainly weren’t going to grumble about it.