MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 Z68 Motherboard Review

[Eldonko]

Test Setup and Testing Methodology

Test Setup and Testing Methodology

Our test setup consists of an Intel i7 2500k Sandy Bridge CPU, MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 motherboard, and a kit of G.Skill memory. All this is powered by a Corsair AX1200w PSU. Here are a few shots of the setup and hardware:

​

Above we have the test bench up and running. As you can see we used an aftermarket air cooler (Zalman CNPS10x Flex) for the CPU along with a single 120mm fan. A second GTX 470 was also added for SLI testing.

​

Above you can have a closer look at the CPU, memory, video cards and PSU used for testing.


Overclocking Methodology

At Hardware Canucks, we understand we have a diverse reader base and to represent a variety of user types, so we put the GD80 through three types of tests.

• Beginner Overclocker - To represent a beginner overclocker or a mainstream user that wants to have a quick and easy way to get some extra performance we used the CPU Level Up setting found in the UEFI BIOS.
• Experienced Overclocker - To represent an experienced overclocker that is looking for the optimal 24/7 overclock to maximize system performance while keeping voltage and temperatures in check we overclocked the GD80 manually and stopped when we started to get concerned with voltage levels and temperatures.
• Advanced Bencher - To represent the bencher that is looking for short benchmark runs at absolute maximum CPU and memory clocks we tested with sub-zero cooling and higher than recommended voltages. More on this is found in the sub-zero testing section.

We did stability testing a little differently for the Sandy Bridge platform than usual. The main stability test used was Linpack (LinX version 0.6.4) with memory usage set to 2,560MB and 25 loops run. In the enthusiast world, Linpack is a benchmark designed to measure performance on Intel CPUs in GFlops. However, it's also a very useful tool for checking the stability of a CPU and memory. LinX picks up very quickly and if you are able to complete a 25 loop test with the specifications above your system is likely stable or very close to it. Typically we would run LinX much longer than 25 loops and add in Prime95 and OCCT; however there have been reports of degrading Sandy Bridge CPU overclockability with running these types of torture tests for long periods.

To avoid risking damage to the processor, after LinX stability was achieved, 2 runs of 3DMark Vantage and 2 runs of 3DMark 11 were run to test 3D stability. Once an overclock passed these tests, this is the point deemed as “stable” for the purposes of this review.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was installed to take advantage of the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) with Sandy Bridge processors. Intel AVX is a 256-bit SIMD floating point vector extension of Intel architecture. The BIOS used for overclocking and benchmarking was version 18.6B8, dated 11/09/2011.


Benchmarking Methodology

Benchmarks in the System Benchmarks section will be a comparison of the i7 2500k at stock speed, at auto overclock speed as set by OC Genie, and at maximum 24/7 overclock to give an idea of how much performance a user can gain when overclocking the Z58A-GD80 G3.

For stock testing, optimized defaults were loaded putting the CPU at 3,292Mhz (33 x 99.8) and memory at 665Mhz and 9-9-9-24 1T timings. The auto overclocked speed on the i7 2500k for OC Genie was 4,216Mhz (42 x 100.4) with memory at 937Mhz and 7-8-7-24 1T timings. The overclocked speed on the i7 2500k for 24/7 stability was 5,005Mhz (50 x 100.01) with memory at 934Mhz and 7-8-7-24 1T timings. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit was used with SP1 installed.

 

[Eldonko]

Overclocking Results

Overclocking Results

As we typically do for reviews, we put the Z68A-GD80 G3 through countless hours of overclocking and testing; from auto overclocking through OC Genie to manual overclocking where tweaking is king. On top of that we froze our 2500k and ran some benchmarks to see how the board can handle the coveted edge of stability and high voltages runs.


GD80 BIOS Adventures

Before going into the overclocking results we want to share our experience with the BIOS on the GD80 to provide a small amount of context. We had to jump through some hoops to get this thing to play nice. To begin with, our board came with a beta BIOS installed (version 18.4B2) and from going through a few forums it looks like quite a few retail boards shipped with this. Normally, beta software wouldn't be of too much concern since by the time a board is released, most of the software kinks have been worked out. The operative term here is "most of the time" because the GD80 bucked this trend in a big way. Regardless of the options we fiddled with in the BIOS, it would immediately throttle down to 4.7Ghz when the CPU was loaded. This was likely due to an abnormally low Long Duration Power Limit which isn't modifiable in the BIOS. At the time, every version released for this board had the same problem and how this was not caught earlier is a mystery only MSI knows.

Next up came the 18.5 revision which had a similar issue to 18.4B2 but instead of throttling from 5Ghz to 4.7Ghz, the CPU speed would not exceed 4.8Ghz at all even if you set a higher multi. Naturally, this was a serious problem since 18.5 wasn't a beta but rather a fully fledged official BIOS. Still not satisfied we went searching for a newer beta on the MSI forums and found 18.7B2. Although the throttling and CPU limit issues were solved, this beta was buggy as hell with overly sensitive keyboard commands and a lack of 2133MHz memory support.

Our story was far from over at this point but let's cut to the chase. After also going through 18.6B8 and a few other unofficial but publicly available revisions, things started falling in line with our expectations. We contacted the MSI tech team and after working with them for a few weeks they provided a new beta BIOS (18.7B4) which included an XMP patch for one of our 2133 kits and later 18.8B1 which fixed the issue with another kit. Thankfully, this shows that MSI is very willing to take feedback and make their BIOS better but in our opinion, such a significant limitation should never have made it into a final product in the first place.

Even though we got most issues sorted we have to stress the fact that up until a few weeks ago, the official BIOS on MSI’s website was several months old and had some serious issues. This is far from ideal for a mainstream overclocker that usually wouldn’t bother registering for forums and digging for beta BIOS versions. On the flip side of this coin, all of these changes were finally rolled into the 18.7 official release which currently resides on MSI's website.


Auto Overclocking

MSI has a slightly different take on the auto overclocking feature with a button on the board called OC Genie which must be pushed in order to activate auto overclocking. Most other boards have a BIOS or software option to enable his feature but MSI couldn't be bothered with that approach.

The result of OC Genie is a boost from our 2500K's stock speed of 3300Mhz to an instant 4216Mhz with no effort whatsoever. Since we were using BIOS 18.6B8 at this time, 2133 was not stable so we had to set memory frequency and timings manually and then enable OC Genie to get stable results. In the end the auto overclock speed was 4,216Mhz and 937Mhz on the memory at 7-8-7-24 1T.


Manual Overclocking

At the time of testing our 2500K wasn't quite "broken in" yet so we weren't really sure what to expect from a manual overclocking experience. In the past, our trusty 2600K shot right to 5Ghz on most boards so that was a natural goal to shoot for. We started with a CPU overclock without touching the memory and went right for 50x multi and 100.1 BCLK. After some testing we ended up with stability on 5Ghz at 1.435v set in the BIOS with VDroop Control to Low VDroop. This gave about 1.47v under load measured with a digital multimeter.

​

After finding that point of CPU stability, the next step is always to maximize the memory overclock. Our G.Skill Trident memory is rated for 1067 @ 9-9-9 but since the GD80 BIOS gave us issues with 2133 we went for the next best thing and tightened timings and dropped a mem freq to 1:7. In the end we ended up with a final memory overclock of 937Mhz at 7-8-7-24 1T at 1.65v.

We ran the GD80 for a few weeks using the 5Ghz overclock and we are happy to report that we did not see any issues with stability at all.

 

[Eldonko]

Sub-Zero Overclocking Results

Sub-Zero Overclocking Results

By now we all know that the release of Sandy Bridge changed the sub-zero benchmarking game. Overclocking these processors doesn’t carry the simple equation of higher volts + cooler temperatures = higher CPU speed. BCLK is hardly overclockable at all, generally capping out at 107 or 108 at the most. Now overclocking is all done based on multiplier changes and CPUs have a Mhz cap so no matter how much voltage you use and how cold your temps, it cannot be surpassed. Even with a Mhz cap, sub-zero is still useful when you find a decent chip because you can keep the chip cool enough for prolonged benchmark runs like those required for 3D benching.

​

The phase change cooler used is these tests a large single stage unit with a 10,500 btu rotary compressor, a mix of r410a and r22a gasses, and a 5 foot flex line. The cooler is tuned for a 300W heat load at -30C so it can handle Sandy Bridge with ease. Temps were low -50s idle and around -42C loaded at 1.58v. The 2500K we tested had a few cold bug symptoms but we were still able to get some decent results.

​

Unfortunately, the GD80's BIOS temperature readings stay at "OC" when sub-zero benching regardless of temperature so a digital thermometer is handy.

The Z68A-GD80 G3 worked great during sub-zero operation and exhibited no issues but we did have a few cold bug problems on our CPU when attempting iGPU benching. We were unable to adjust Vcore when using the iGPU without the system becoming unstable.

In the end we were able to reach 5,521Mhz on the 2500K and no higher due to the chip’s frequency cap. If it wasn’t for this limit on the chip it would have went much higher with cold as we could lower voltage to 1.45v and still max out the chip. Basically this means that the GD80 has what it takes to push any chip past the limits of most cooling solutions.

Click for full screenshot​

First we have SuperPI results, both 1M and 32M

Click for full screenshot​

We also ran wPrime and PIFAST to complete the 2D benchmark suite.

 

[Eldonko]

System Benchmarks

In the System Benchmarks section we will show a number benchmark comparisons of the 2500K and Z68A-GD80 G3 using the stock speed, applying the OC Genie overclock, and our manual overclock. This will illustrate how much performance can be gained by overclocking the 2500k using the MSI’s GD80.


SuperPI Benchmark

SuperPi calculates the number of digits of PI in a pure 2D benchmark. For the purposes of this review, calculation to 32 million places will be used. RAM speed, RAM timings, CPU speed, L2 cache, and Operating System tweaks all effect the speed of the calculation, and this has been one of the most popular benchmarks among enthusiasts for several years.

SuperPi was originally written by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 and was updated later by snq to support millisecond timing, cheat protection and checksum. The version used in these benchmarks, 1.5 is the official version supported by hwbot.

Results: A 23% increase in SuperPI 32M is noted going from stock speed of 3300Mhz to the CPU Level Up speed of 4200Mhz on the 2500K and GD80. Jumping up to the manual overclock speed of 5000Mhz a 34% gain is noted.


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.

In this system benchmark section we will use the x64 Main Processor Performance (CPU) test scenario. The Main Processor Performance (CPU) test scenario uses all of the system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Results: The CINEBENCH R11.5 test results also show an impressive increase in performance in rendering moving from a stock system to two levels of an overclocked system. For CPU rendering, a 28% to 52% improvement (in points) was achieved when moving to OC Genie and manual OC speeds.


Sandra Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media Benchmarks

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. The software suite provides most of the information (including undocumented) users like to know about hardware, software, and other devices whether hardware or software. The name “Sandra” is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means "defender", "helper of mankind".

The software version used for these tests is SiSoftware Sandra 2012. In the 2012 version of Sandra, SiSoft has updated the .Net benchmarks and the GPGPU benchmarks have been upgraded to General Processing (GP) benchmarks, able to fully test the new APU (CPU+GPU) processors. The two benchmarks used are the Processor Multi-Media and Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These three benchmarks were chosen as they provide a good indication of three varying types of system performance. The multi-media test shows how the processor handles multi-media instructions and data and the arithmetic test shows how the processor handles arithmetic and floating point instructions. These two tests illustrate two important areas of a computer’s speed and provide a wide scope of results.

Results: Sandra processor arithmetic and multi-media show impressive improvements on an overclocked system, with 28% to 52% gains in performance across the board for the OC Genie and manual overclock.


MaxxMem Benchmark

Created by MaxxPI², the MaxxMem benchmark tests your computer’s raw memory performance, combining copy, read, write and latency tests into one global score. This memory benchmark is a classic way to measure bandwidth of a memory subsystem.

MaxxMem uses continuous memoryblocks, sized in power of 2 from 16MB up to 512MB, starting either writing to or reading from it. To enable high-precision memory performance measurement, they both internally work with multiple passes and averages calculations per run.

Further, the main goal was to minimize (CPU) cache pollution on memory reads and to eliminate it (almost completely) on memory writes. Additionally, MaxxMem operates with an aggressive data prefetching algorithm. This all will deliver an excellent judge of bandwidth while reading and writing.

Results: Moving from stock speed to the OC Genie overclock on the GD80, we see nice gains of 21-40% in memory read, write, and copy. When we up to the manual overclock, bandwidth goes up even more with improvements of 39-48%!

The results are similar when looking at latency; 29% is gained by OC Genie and 32% with the manual overclock. The reason we see such a gain with OC Genie is we set memory manually before applying OC Genie since 2133 was not stable.

 

[Eldonko]

Conclusion

Conclusion

After years of playing the underdog, MSI has been working hard to become one of the premier motherboard vendors in North America. With the Z68A-GD80 G3, they’re off to a great start. This board was a particularly innovative solution for Sandy Bridge motherboards since was the first to market with certain features. Not only does it have a fully functional and refined UEFI BIOS (something certain competitors still lack) but it was one of the first to bring us true PCI-E Gen 3 support. ASUS has just released their Gen 3 boards recently and Gigabyte still lacks the Gen 3 switches in all 1155 boards but the G1 Sniper 2. On top of that, similar to what we saw with the ASUS P67 Sabertooth, MSI has added “Military Certified” VRM components which give peace of mind for long term stability and more importantly ups the warranty to a total of five years, regardless of the marketing hyperbole.

All of this may make it sound like the Z68A-GD80 G3 should be one of the best Sandy Bridge boards on the market. Unfortunately once the rubber hit the road we found it did have a few rough edges in some key areas. First up, at the time of writing there was a worrying three month delay between official BIOS revisions on MSI’s website. Normally this wouldn’t be all that worrying if the previous release had been working properly but that just wasn’t the case. The 18.5 version was so plagued by overclocking limitations, missing XMP profiles and stability issues that we’re surprised it was posted in the first place let alone only replaced three months later. To MSI’s credit, 18.7 was released a few weeks back and seems to have fixed the vast majority of problems.

Once we found a working BIOS overclocking the GD80 was quite easy with the intuitive UEFI layout and our 2500K could run at the coveted 5GHz mark without any problems. Sub-zero results were also great and we feel that the GD80 will be able to max out any Sandy bridge chip without an issue.

While manual overclocking on this board was easy, nothing can beat OC Genie for straightforward automatic clock speed increases. It not only increases CPU speeds but also provides a significant memory overclock which puts its results far above those of many competing utilities. A novice user can buy a cheap 2500K processor and with the press of a button safely overclock it by a good 900Mhz.

The Z68A-GD80 G3’s price is up in the $250-260 price range which puts it on a level footing with some of today’s most respected boards like the ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe and Gigabyte’s Z68A-UD5. It is difficult to choose a winner between the three because each board has its own unique flavor but The GD80 does have an edge in the warranty department. Unfortunately, it is currently behind the competition in terms of BIOS support but once updates start (hopefully) flowing on a more regular basis, MSI could have a clear winner in the $250 price range

While the GD80 may have some minor issues, it has the makings of an absolutely fabulous motherboard that packs enough features to satisfy just about anyone. We do want to give credit where credit is due for Gen 3 support, a great auto overclocking routine, an attractive yet intuitive UEFI BIOS and a very useful Control Center utility which includes memory timings. As such, MSI’s Z68A-GD80 G3 gets our Innovative award.


Pros

- Live Update 5 makes updating drivers and utilities painless
- Control Center includes memory timings
- OC Genie overclocks both CPU and memory
- Attractive UEFI BIOS featuring mouse and Windows support
- PCI-E 3.0 and Ivy Bridge ready
- HDMI and DVI-I outputs included
- Virtu, SSD caching, USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s included
- Military Certified VRM components
- 5 year warranty


Cons

- One of the more expensive Z68 options
- Latest official BIOS is fairly old and has some bugs
- Potential for issues with older 2133 memory kits
- Possible clearance issue with Marvell SATA port when running SLI