Overclock

With votage regulation being handled by the CPU now as well on top of everything else overclocking is more and more dependent on the CPU itself more than the motherboard. Where motherboards do make a difference is in their BIOS where they control how much adjustability you have as well as with overclocking specific features on the board itself to allow for adjustments on the fly and/or voltage check pads. MSI did include voltage check pads on the PCB itself but with this being a gaming focused board they kept things simple where an overclocking focused board would have more features. The one overclocking test we do perform is to see how much the built in auto overclocking functionality will overclock for you, MSI’s OC Genie takes our 4770K from 3.5 to 4.0 GHz. This isn’t a huge bump but it should still be enough to be noticeable in everyday usage.