MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 Review

Overview

 

This is the first MSI motherboard that we have tested here at pcGameware, the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 is MSI’s top of the range Z68 motherboard, let’s see how it compares to our current pick of the Z68 motherboards ASRock’s Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3. Currently retailing for under £200 the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 is around £15-20 cheaper than the ASRock board.

 

 

As you can see from the images above and below the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 comes in smart box that illustrates all of the features and specifications of the motherboard both on the front and the back of the box as well as under the lid.

 

 

Some of the board’s more interesting features are the support for PCIe 3.0, the Click BIOS II (same BIOS both in the UEFI and Windows) , military class specification (Military Class II) and its 1sec overclocking feature (OC Genie II).

 

The packaging itself was a little disappointing for a premium motherboard, but none of the contents of the box were damaged so I guess it was at least adequate.

 

 

In the box was the following:

• User Guide, Quick Installation Guide, Quick Guide, Software Application User Guide & a Certificate of Quality & Stability
• Drivers & Utilities DVD (inc Norton Security)
• SLI Connector
• Motherboard back-plate
• x4 SATA3 6GBs cables
• USB 3 back-plate
• x2 Molex to SATA power connectors
• A selection of MB/Front Panel Connector Blocks (damn I love these things)
• Voltage monitoring leads

 

 

Below you can see the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 out of the box, I was somewhat concerned when I saw those stickers as I feared that they may be awkward to remove, luckily they weren’t! The board looks rather smart IMHO and doesn’t suffer from any of those crazy heat-sinks that we are beginning to see (gun clips, guns etc. (yes that’s you Gigabyte!)).

 

 

• An important word about PCIe 3.0

The introduction of PCIe 3.0 maximises the bandwidth available for next-gen VGA cards by increasing bandwidth from 16GBs to 32GBs (total bandwidth for x16 slot).

NOTE: To take full advantage of the bandwidth offered by PCIe 3.0 you will need to install an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU. In addition to this you will need to ensure that your graphics card also supports the new PCIe 3.0 standard.

 

Specifications/Features

courtesy of MSI

• Additional details available here

 

First Impressions

 

As I noted earlier the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 looks good, but it hasn’t quite got the wow factor of the ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3, but it looks better in the flesh (or is that PCB) than in any of the photographs.

Take note of the power connector near the centre of the motherboard. This ATX 6-Pin Power Connector is to provide additional power to graphics card/s and is mainly only used if you are running SLI (as I am) or CrossFire. I have seen this on other boards and it’s not something that I am keen on (and I’m unsure why it is present only on some boards!?) as it’s in a damn awkward position and makes for very unsightly cabling.

 

 

The heat-sinks are rather smart too, in fact the board looks somewhat classy in comparison to some of the more garish designs available. I’m really beginning to warm to the design , oh and it will go well with the blue LED lighting of my MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Editions!

 

 

It’s nice to see the Power and Reset buttons on the motherboard and that OC Genie button (that overclocks the system to 4.2GHz) with a single press is a very nice feature. It’s a shame it wasn’t 4.3GHz as this has been found to be the optimum setting for games (read here for more info).

The THX logo seems to be nothing other than a sticker over a chip. As the board utilizes a Realtek ALC892 chipset then I can only assume that this relates to the THX TruStudio software that the board is bundled with!

 

 

There does seem to be one thing missing though and that is any form of visible on-board diagnostics; there seems to be no LED display to show boot-up sequence, so I am unsure as to how you perform any diagnostics if the board fails to POST (maybe it just never fails!).

 

Hardware Installation

 

While installing the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 into my rig no problems were encountered as I switched from the Asus P8P67 Pro to the MSI board.

The only MSI accessories used were the motherboard back-plate, a single SATA 6GBs cable and one of the very useful motherboard/Front Panel Connector Blocks (MSI refers to this as an M-Connector).

I had no issues with the mounting of my rigs Zalman CNPS11X Extreme CPU Cooler. I connected my SSD (Kingston HyperX 240GB) to one of the 6GBs SATA ports (white) using one of the 6GBs SATA cables provided. As predicted that damn additional power socket for the Graphics Card/s was not easy to reach though!

 

 

The rig was fired up for the first time (via the on-board Power Button) without issue and I was soon into the MSI Click BIOS II (very nice!), after ensuring that AHCI was enabled (and SATA2 Hot Plug enabled (recommended here by MSI)) for my SSD it was time to install a fresh copy of Windows.

 

Testing Methodology/Setup

 

Before installing any OS the following features were disabled in the BIOS (as this is a Gaming Rig) they won’t get used and I hate all those exclamation errors showing up in the Device Manager window.

Disabled the following in the BIOS:

• Onboard IEEE 1394 Controller
• External SATA 6GB/s Controller Mode
• Onboard USB 3.0 Controller

A new installation of Windows Home Premium (service pack 1) was performed and the following drivers were then installed. The latest MSI drivers were used and can been obtained here (I did not use the ones on the disc as I wanted to be using the latest).

Drivers installed:

• Intel Chipset (INF driver ver:9.2.3.1020)
• NVIDIA Graphics (285.62)
• Realtek High Definition Audio Driver (6.0.1.6487)
• Realtek PCI-E Ethernet Drivers (7.48.823.2011)
• ROCCAT Kone[+] driver (drv 1.49 / fw 1.45)

During the 3+ weeks of testing the following tools/benchmarks & games were used:

• 3DMark 11
• Unigine Heaven
• Metro 2033
• Prime95
• CoreTemp
• CPUz

• Battlefield 3
• Skyrim
• Singularity
• Batman Arkham City

 

Hardware Performance

 

First the board was tested at its default settings (CPU @ 3.3GHz with memory @ 1333MHz 9-9-9-24 1T) and after running multiple runs of 3DMark 11, Unigine Heaven and Metro 2033 the motherboard was deemed to be stable, so it was on to the overclocking. The most logical first step was to try the OC Genie II feature, this can be accessed via the on-motherboard button or via the BIOS (UEFI BIOS or Windows) and automatically overclocks the CPU to 4.2GHz and sets the XMP (eXtreme Memory Profile). To do this the CPU Voltage was automatically set to 1.35v; it is worth noting with this overclock Intel Speed-Step is effectively disabled and the CPU Frequency & Voltage will not step down when idle.

With 4.2GHz proving to be stable it was time to set my default overclock of 4.3Ghz (read why 4.3Ghz here), to do this I just used the same settings that OC Genie II had dialed in but set the multiplier to 43! This once again was stable, below are the BIOS settings used (UEFI BIOS & Windows).

 

 

By adjusting nothing more that the Multiplier and the CPU Voltage I made it all the way to 4.9GHz. To get there I had to use 1.475v for my power hungry 2500K (seems I got one from the crap bin!) to ensure stability. Even while overclocking at high GHz the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 only crashed once, in fact as I type this review with the motherboard still in my rig, this is the only crash I have ever seen!

At 4.9GHz the temps were high (80 degrees) so for further stress testing I dropped back slightly to 4.8GHz @ 1.45v.

 

 

With stability now proven and the overclocking stopped (no, I wasn’t brave enough to go for 5.0GHz, remember I’m only running on air cooling, well that’s my excuse anyway!) it was time to see what the benchmarks were like:

 

• CPU @ 4.8GHz / Memory @ 1600MHz (6-8-6-24 2T)

Motherboard	3DMark 11	Unigine Heaven	Metro 2033
MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 @4.8GHz	12525	1634	55.67

 

Now let’s take a look at how the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 compares to the Asus P8P67 Pro in my rig while running at 4.3GHz.

 

• CPU @ 4.3GHz / Memory @ 1600MHz (6-8-6-24 2T)

Motherboard	3DMark 11	Unigine Heaven	Metro 2033
MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 @4.3GHz	12185	1631	55.67 FPS
Asus P8P67 Pro @4.3GHz	12167	1616	55.00 FPS

 

Although the scores are similar the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 wins across all 3 benchmarks, so top marks to MSI then.

Although this is even more impressive as the Base Clock of the MSI is a little low @ 99.8MHz, with this in mind I set about modifying the Base Clock…

 

• Further Overclocking (Base Clock)

First I tried the Base Clock at 101MHz (10100 in the BIOS) and once again (this seems the norm for this MB) the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 remained stable. I then pushed on to 102MHz (10200) and again the board was completely stable. Using AIDA64 I noted that the memory speed was now somewhat improved also (we have changed the BClk after all!). So with a few more MHz running around my system I decided to re-run the benchmarks again.

 

• CPU @ 4.388GHz / Memory @ 1633MHz (6-8-6-24 2T)

Motherboard	3DMark 11	Unigine Heaven	Metro 2033
MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 @4.3GHz	12185	1631	55.67
MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 @4.388GHz (Base Clock @ 102)	12285	1631	55.67

 

As you can see there has been a small increase in the 3DMark 11 score (the others show no increase due to the fact that they a mainly GPU bound) with an increase of 100 marks. If I were to be running this board in my rig (best look at the Final Thoughts!) then this is the setting that I would use on a daily basis.

 

• Additional Software/Features

There are a host of features that this motherboard supports such as (Lucid Virtu, RAID, Super Charger & Winki) that I will not be taking a look at in this review, mainly due to the fact that I (and others) rarely use these features. For more detail on some of the features mentioned above please take a look here.

I would like to have a look at some of the software provided by MSI as I feel it deserves a special mention, starting with Click BIOS II for Windows and Control Center.

 

 

The Windows implementation of Click BIOS II is effectively the same as the standard UEFI BIOS, which is nice and quite a cool idea as navigating around one interface is obviously better than two. Although it was noted that most of the settings changed would require a restart of Windows, but it was nice to effectively be able to browse the BIOS while in Windows.

The Control Center is a very similar piece of software without the Click BIOS feel, I would tend to use one or the other, my preference is for the Windows implementation of Click BIOS II.

 

 

MSI Live Update is a great utility allowing the user to keep up to date with all the latest Drivers/Utilities etc. (even the BIOS is covered (CPU & GPU)). The utility scans your computer for the selected updates and reports back. The software can then be downloaded and installed (even the BIOS!), very nice.

 

Finally let’s take a look at this:

 

 

I have come across this software before and those of you who have read the review from the beginning (that’s all of you I’m sure) will remember that THX sticker stuck over some chip/s on the motherboard? Well I have no idea what it’s all about! You can use this THX software to mess about with the sound (why? I have no idea), as none of the messing seems to make the sound any better and quite frankly the software should be left well alone, as there’s nothing wrong with the Realtek software supplied, sorry THX…

 

Final Thoughts

 

Wow! At last we make it to the Final Thoughts and it’s a little difficult to know where to start. But what we have here is one hell of a motherboard for sub £200, not only does it look good, but it has performed as good as any other board we have seen so far.

Yes the packaging is a little lack luster and the lack of any on-board diagnostics is a shame, but to be fair I haven’t found the need for any diagnostics as the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 has performed flawlessly during my 3+ weeks of testing. I have never tested a board that has been this stable, always during testing you start running into BSODs and crashes at some point, but in my time with the board I only saw one crash (whilst running Prime95). In the end it was my nerve that ran out due to high voltages and temperatures, the MSI motherboard was still keen for more…

The Click BIOS now has matured into a really usable interface and to be treated to the same look & feel in Windows is a real bonus. The rest of the software (Live Update & Control Center) are also very polished and were a joy to use.

In summary we have a Z68 motherboard that looks cool, has good build quality, performs beautifully and comes with a great suite of software, and all of this comes at a reasonable price! Needless to say there is no way this motherboard is leaving my rig. If you fancy one of the best performing Z68 motherboards on the market, I suggest you put the MSI Z68A-GD80 G3 at the top of your list.

 

Verdict