MSI P67A-GD65 Motherboard Review

Test Setup

MSI P67A-GD65
Intel Core i5-2500K
4GB Kingston Hyper-X
EVGA GTX570
Cougar CM1000 Modular PSU
Windows 7 x64
Noctua NH-D14

Overclocking inc OC Genie II

Knowing that this CPU happily will do 4.6GHz but has a bit of a struggle going much past it without silly voltages we were hopeful than the excellent OC Genie would at least get us to the 4.6GHz mark.

Sadly it has many issues, not least of which we'll show below, but for now the best it manages is 4.19 GHz which is a good overclock and plenty fast enough for most people, but considering the Gigabyte UD7 and ASUS Maximus IV both have in-BIOS 4.6 GHz options it's quite disappointing to see something so conservative.

It might however be to do with the mid-range nature of the board itself as despite some hefty voltage and plenty of tweaking we couldn't get it stable at all past 4.7 GHz. It was pretty "all or nothing". Whereas with the LGA1366 and P55s you had a gradual slope of stability from fully stable down to a suicide shot, this either worked or it didn't.

This screenshot was taken prior to tuning the voltage for stability and in the end we ran at 1.45v to keep our 4.69 GHz overclock.

The BIOS still feels fairly rough around the edges. Despite using the very latest one from MSI there were still some issues to overcome.

One of the more "fun" ones was when first using the OC Genie it kept giving the "overclock failed" beeps. Much faffing about later we discovered that if you manually set your RAM speed prior to using the OC Genie button it gets... well let's be kind and say it becomes rather hopeful about the potential speed your processor will achieve.

If you leave everything on auto this goes away, but nonetheless it's quite fun to see it attempt a 25 GHz overclock. If only the damn thing had booted to CPUz I think we'd have had the world record well into the next decade.