MSI Z87 MPower Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Thursday, July 11, 2013
Benchmarks - Overclocked
As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match. The effective overclock for these tests is 4.5GHz @ 45x multiplier and 100 BLCK. The results are show below.
CPU-Z
SiSoft Sandra
Unreal Tournament 3
Crysis
Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare
Overclocking Conclusion
When overclocking it is important to find a "sweet spot" where the performance curve tops out and still remains stable with a reasonable amount of heat production. With this system we found that the 4770K runs HOT and by hot we mean extremely warm over previous Ivy and Sandy bridge processors. Most of this heat can be attributed to the smaller CPU die and difficulty with heat transfer but can also be attributed to the onboard voltage regulator that is now part of the CPU. These things combined has made Haswell heat bound meaning that short of extreme cooling our/your overclocks will be limited.
Overclocking the Z87 MPower was actually rather difficult for a number of reasons. The biggest if these was the utter lack of actual BCLK adjustments. Some will tell you that BCLK adjustments are pointless on Ivy Bridge and Haswell but without it you have very little memory control beyond multiplier selections in the UEFI.
The really frustrating thing was that every control you needed to make BCLK changes are in the UEFI including the BCLK Strap and actual BCLK but any change would render the system dead. 101BCLK would attempt to boot windows though wouldn't bring up the desktop. Now before you think this is an issue with our processor you should know our 4770K Retail will run 130Mhz BCLK on other motherboards so its not a CPU quality issue but something ingrained in this particular motherboard. With any luck a future BIOS update will resolve the issue.
We are happy to say that straight multiplier changes worked flawless along with memory multiplier and ring ratio (North Bridge) so there is still plenty to tweak and after a few hours we got a decent overclock and almost 30GB/s in memory bandwidth!
Overclocking the Z87 MPower was actually rather difficult for a number of reasons. The biggest if these was the utter lack of actual BCLK adjustments. Some will tell you that BCLK adjustments are pointless on Ivy Bridge and Haswell but without it you have very little memory control beyond multiplier selections in the UEFI.
The really frustrating thing was that every control you needed to make BCLK changes are in the UEFI including the BCLK Strap and actual BCLK but any change would render the system dead. 101BCLK would attempt to boot windows though wouldn't bring up the desktop. Now before you think this is an issue with our processor you should know our 4770K Retail will run 130Mhz BCLK on other motherboards so its not a CPU quality issue but something ingrained in this particular motherboard. With any luck a future BIOS update will resolve the issue.
We are happy to say that straight multiplier changes worked flawless along with memory multiplier and ring ratio (North Bridge) so there is still plenty to tweak and after a few hours we got a decent overclock and almost 30GB/s in memory bandwidth!
