MSI 785GM-E65 Motherboard Review

Overclocking

Without doubt, overclocking was extremely frustrating on the 785GM-E65. Despite a very positive initial impression when we started - with core unlocking present and plenty of extra MHz achieved - an actual stable overclock was never achieved, hence the final result.

The four core unlock that has previously worked on boards like Asus and Gigabyte wouldn't take at all here, regardless of voltage or clock speed applied, and despite being able to boot and get into Windows at very low overclocks the system wasn't test-stable. Dropping the 720 Black Edition back to its standard tri-core configuration meant the MSI would overclock a little further, but we were still limited to just barely over 3GHz. We literally spent hours and hours fiddling with different combinations of multiplier only, multiplier and HTT, and different voltages with no effect.

That's not just exceedingly poor, it was highly frustrating. The final overclock we managed was a 233MHz HTT with a 14x multiplier, equating to 3.12GHz. The memory was run at 1,486MHz since it would not accept 1,784MHz at the higher multiplier. The HT and CPU-NB clocks were set to 9x for a 2,007MHz clock speed. The voltages were 1.45V CPU VDD, 1.35V CPU-NB VDD, 1.488V CPU voltage, 1.39V CPU-NB, 1.6V memory, 1.177V 785G and 1.277V HT Link voltage - of which these last two are directly linked together.

By this point we had also given up trying to tweak the memory timings, not wanting to risk yet more instability, so the end overclock was left at an SPD 9-9-9-24-33-1T.

To make things worse, we also found the IGP overclocking to not take whatever we tried, so we left it at a default 500MHz.

BIOS

The BIOS layout is very intuitive, and those familiar with MSI boards will find themselves right at home. Under the Cell Menu, where all the fun overclocking stuff resides, we have find all features here that mirror its high performance boards. All frequency changes are catered for: CPU, CPU-NB, HTT and memory, and there is the very useful realtime showing of what the frequency and multiplier changes do to all the separate clocks.

Its 'EC Firmware' is a single setting for core unlocking, so long as the 'Advanced Clock Calibration' is set to Auto. Under the 'Advance DRAM configuration' there are plenty of memory timings to adjust - as many as you'd find in any high performance board - and further down the main Cell Menu page the voltages are numerous and can be changed with a necessarily acute finesse of 10s of millivolts.

The disadvantage however is that the voltages cannot be keyed in directly, so it takes time to scroll through - especially for CPU related voltages. In addition, the HT and NB (785G) voltages are tied together directly, so increasing one does the other.

Additional features include the Active Phase Switching for the CPU - although why MSI does not throw this under its GreenPower brand left us a tad confused - and there is some fan control for the CPU fan only. Finally, there's also the four BIOS profile saving slots which are ever useful and the M-Flash which we'd avoid like it was giving out Ebola.