Overclocked Performance Summary

I have really changed how I do my overclock testing with motherboards. Every single test you see in the main section is repeated in the section that follows, including power consumption. As I test more products, a good picture of overclocking efficiency should emerge, which should prove interesting when it comes to those products that are 100% overclocking-oriented. I have grouped the results into sections, and all Intel products are tested with 4.6 GHz CPU speed. Memory speeds vary depending on the platform's ability.


I got my "reference" 4.6 GHz overclock stable using 1.225 V in the BIOS. This resulted in slightly less by both physical measurement and by software, but power consumption numbers proved to be right in line with what other boards used. Memory clocked up to 2666 MHz easily as well, and I was able to get a bit more too, although that's not directly reflected in these numbers.


As you can see, all the numbers are very decently placed, right in the middle of the pack. I was left feeling pretty good about the Dragon-covered MSI Z77A-GD65 GAMING board, even if MSI's "MTC" didn't feel like testing these boards with decent clocks like I have. I've run into considerable difficulties with some boards when it comes to overclocking, but all I did here before getting rock-solid stability was to set the voltages and enable XMP. I did try to lower the CPU voltage a bit, but the board wasn't willing to cooperate, which was no surprise considering the power consumption results. I ran the system through my full suite of benchmarks and a 24-hour Prime95 burn-in test with no problems, and you can find all the results below.

AIDA64

CPU OC Performance

3D-Oriented OC Performance