MSI Z97 MPower Overclocking Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
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 4.8GHz @ 48x multiplier and 100 BLCK.
The Devils Canyon processor was designed to improve overclocking performance of the Haswell core and also give a nice boost of performance out of the box. For the most part this is accurate but really depends on your processor. In terms of Core i7 4770K vs Core i7 4790K you are already guaranteed 500Mhz + 400Mhz (if you enable Turbo) and anything beyond that is bonus. In this review we pushed the Devils Canyon to 4.8Ghz which is only 300Mhz more than what we typically got from the Core i7 4770K and only 100Mhz than a Turbo enabled Core i7 4790K.
Kinda puts things into perspective doesn't it?
The results of our overclocking are show below.
The results speak for themselves and show only a minor gain in performance given the higher default clock of the 4790K. Of course overclocking the Core i7 4770K showed larger gains since the frequency swing was close to 1Ghz over stock whereas in this review we only got 800Mhz (or 400Mhz if you consider Turbo)
The really interesting thing to take from this is that overclocking does serve a purpose and while the newer Core i7 4790K is faster out of the box you can tweak and tune a Core i7 4770K to match the performance and in some cases exceed it, or, you can go with the faster processor and forgo any overclocking.
We did have some fun with the Core i7 4790K and decided to see just how fast it would run and are happy to report that our chip hit 6.1Ghz running 2D benchmarks and would run 3D benches all day at 6Ghz. Of course that is mostly the quality of the silicon but wouldn't be possible without a proper motherboard.
