MSI P67A-GD80 (B3) Motherboard Review - PAGE 5

Overclocking:

Overclocking a system to its maximum performance level takes more than just a highly overclockable processor. In fact, components such as power supplies, memory and the motherboard are also very important when it comes to achieving a stable clock speed. The motherboard is perhaps the most important piece of the overclocking bundle, as it is the command center for all the add-on parts. It is for this reason that many companies have started to add features such as improved cooling solutions, better voltage regulation modules, and more to their products. These all play a part in achieving the highest possible overclock and can be the means to pushing your processor beyond what is possible.

For overclocking I will be using a water cooling setup, and increased the voltage as necessary until the maximum clock speed is reached. Since our Intel i7 2600K is an unlocked K series processor, the majority of the overclocking will be done via the multiplier. After we reach the maximum stable speed capable with the multiplier we will start to increase the bclock and try to achieve the highest overclock possible.

MSI P67A-GD80:

Intel Core i7-2600K (OC Genie II)

• Baseclock : 100 MHz
• Clock multiplier : 42x
• Processor clock : 4200 MHz
• Memory clock : 1600 MHz
• Processor voltage : 1.34V

The included OC Genie II button is an easy to use overclocking feature that allows users to increase the CPU clock speed by simply pressing the button. To use the feature, the system must first be powered off and after the button is pushed the motherboard will automatically overclock the processor when the system is powered restarted. According to MSI this feature can boost the performance of a Sandybridge processor by up to 23%, with no additional effort on the user's part.

In our testing we hit the exact mark advertised by MSI, as the frequency of our 2600K was increase by 800Mhz, which will give us the aforementioned 23% performance boost. In all we really like this feature, mainly because you get an instant boost in performance simply by pressing a button. However, since the OC Genie II button is located directly on the motherboard, it can be difficult to access in certain cases.

Intel Core i7-2600K

• Baseclock : 100.9 MHz
• Clock multiplier : 49x
• Processor clock : 4942 MHz
• Memory clock : 1600 MHz
• Processor voltage : 1.4V

With the K-series processors, overclocking is easy affair. Essentially, all that is needed to get a 2600K to it's frequency threshold is to increase the unlocked multiplier to its maximum level while continuously adding voltage as needed. Using this method, we were able to increase the multiplier of our 2600K up to 49x before we hit a wall. At this point we started to fine tune the bclock and in the end we were able to increase it to 100.9MHz. This gave us a final speed of 4942MHz, which is an increase of more than 30% over the reference clock.