MSI Z77A-GD65 (Z77) Motherboard Review

Cinebench R11.5

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

Starting with Cinebench, straight out of the box, the Z77A-GD65 gave some solid results that fell inline with the other boards we tested. We saw a healthy increase in score once we had the CPU overclocked to 4.6GHz.

Super PI

Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits.

Moving over to Super PI, we see the GD65 giving good results again, though the slowest compared to our other boards, even if only by a few seconds. A noticeable two minutes were shaved off of the calculation time when overclocked.