Test System

Initial Setup

Getting the board up and running the first time comes with a few caveats, but each is very closely detailed on the board itself, as shown in the pictures above. The lower PCIe slot is only active when you have an Ivy Bridge CPU installed, so MSI had the foresight to place a large sticker over the slot to prevent installing anything into it without first reading the warning about that slot's connectivity. The second connectivity tip is denoted by a bright orange sticker that is placed over the SATA ports on the board's right edge, noting that the best performance is achieved by using the onboard Intel SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and the label uses a large white arrow to clearly point to which ones you should use first. Speaking of what you should use first: when it comes to installing your memory into the MSI Z77A-GD65 GAMING board, the slots you should install your memory sticks into are, if you only use two sticks, also clearly marked on the board's surface.


The USB 3.0 pin header for case front panel connectivity is fitted with a nice 90-degree port, making case cabling that much easier to organize, but I found the other front panel connectors, the ones for the buttons and LEDs on the front or top of most cases, to be located on the bottom edge of the board, directly in the middle. I usually find such pin headers as close to the right edge as possible, so this particular placement caught my attention immediately, as some cases don't offer cables long enough to reach that far without losing the ability to hide them well. Most current cases do come with a ton of cable management features that will prevent such a placement from becoming an issue, but this might pose a bit of a problem if you happen to use an older case.


With that out of the way, installing my dual HD 7950 video cards, Coolermaster cooler, and G.Skill memory into the MSI Z77A-GD65 GAMING board was very easy, with plenty of room for everything to fit in properly. I really like that there is room for you to place a fan on top of the memory while having a card in the uppermost slot, as this has proven to be a problem for me with the ASUS Maximus V Extreme that I now use for all my memory testing. With the uppermost slot of the MSI Z77A-GD65 GAMING board being just a PCIex1 slot and most expansion cards that are PCIex1 being rather short in length, the chance of running into fitting issues here is greatly minimized compared to boards that have a full PCIe x16 slot at the very top. The coolers for the VRM are also low to the board's surface, so they don't interfere with fans from aftermarket coolers. I've now played with a few boards where the fan of my Coolermaster TPC 812 was rather close to the MOSFET coolers, but there's almost half an inch between the VRM heatsinks and the bottom of the Coolermaster fan on the MSI Z77A-GD65 GAMING.


Initial setup with a boosted Turbo profile and without XMP enabled was pretty easy. The memory matched standard JEDEC timings. I did note that the Turbo profile, although higher across all cores than most other boards for single-threaded loads, ran a rather relaxed Turbo profile, which, I am pretty sure, will affect performance a little bit at stock. I have noticed this to be the case with quite a few early BIOSes before, so I am sure MSI will get that fixed shortly with an updated BIOS. MSI had yet to release a second BIOS at the time testing was completed, but that's no surprise since Newegg listed the product on April 10th—only three days after I finished my testing.

Power Consumption

We measure CPU power consumption since one of our first tasks is to truly verify system stability. I isolate the power coming through the 8-pin ATX connector using an in-line meter that provides voltage and current readings as well as total wattage passed through it. While this may not prove to isolate the CPU power draw in all instances, it does serve as a good indicator of board efficiency and effective VRM design. I also measure total system power consumption, which allows you to get an idea of how much power the board and all installed devices draw.




The MSI Z77A-GD65 GAMING put up pretty decent numbers under power consumption testing. Total power consumed in every instance was pretty low, but some of that may be due to the rather relaxed Turbo profile.