[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
This is my favourite part of testing hardware and with a board of this value, it is going to be interesting to see what we can achieve with it. With the board packing 8 power phases, 1x 8 pin 12v connectors and a very aggressive heat sink design style, it is likely to be a good clocker for a small motherboard, but unlikely to break any records or stretch those scores set by its bigger brother, the Z87 GD65 Gaming. However, is it going to be able to deliver a good clock in our testing?
Well starting with the BIOS, everything is where I would have expected it to be. The only disappointment at this stage was a lack of vDroop information, as it only displayed – and + values for it, instead of giving an actual figure. Other than that, the menus were easy to go through and find the tools that were needed, everything was where i would expect to find it. Starting with the test bench overclock, I entered the 45x multiplier, with a standard 100BLCK and then I upped the voltage to 1.275v which is what this CPU requires for this clock speed. After saving and exiting, we were off and straight into windows, the first time.
Next step was to see how far I could push the multiplier. For some reason, CPU-Z did not want to display correct voltage on both of the overclocks we achieved and was even a little buggy at stock. The voltages I used to attain this overclock was 1.45 volts, a little high for Haswell, but well within the thermal limits of the cooler. Baring in mind that I was using a Corsair H80i All in One liquid cooler I could afford to push the thermal limits a little. Here is the maximum clock speed I achieved on a 100% stable overclock:
It was a good overclock in my eyes for a motherboard that is aimed at gaming rather than overclocks, some will argue that a gamer will want to overclock to get the gains from their CPU in the games they play, but as you will see in the up coming benchmarks, it delivers performance in over areas. This overclock was 100% Prime95 stable, although it did kick out a lot of heat, there was still enough overhead that I wasn’t worrying about frying my chip.
Overall, my experience with overclocking on the MSI Z87M Gaming motherboard was a pleasant one. The one thing that really let it down for myself was the lack of vDroop information, especially in terms of having no actual values to increase. This could be amended at a later date with a BIOS revision, but until then we can only hope. There is the MSI Extreme Tuning Utility which is software based overclocking. This is normally something that I would shy away from using but given how easy the software is to use, given you know what you’re doing, it was a good tool for the motherboard.
Now it’s time to see how the MSI Z87M Gaming performs in benchmarks…
