MSI 970 Gaming Review

Overclocking

We've managed to hit around 4.8GHz with most of the 990FX boards we've tested in the past. However, we couldn't get quite that far with the MSI 970 Gaming.

We started trying to find a decent HTT frequency, but this seemed to cap off at 230MHz to be 100 per cent stable. However, we had to drop this to 210MHz when gunning for a high CPU frequency.

The end result was a CPU overclock of 4.62GHz, using a vcore of 1.425V and NB voltage of 1.2V - above these settings and things would get too toasty.

EFI

The EFI appears to look and feel the same as MSI's Gaming boards for Intel platforms. However there were a couple of quirks. We were unable to manually input many settings, such as voltages and there was a little bit of lag when pressing certain buttons such as f10 to save and exit.

Not major issues in themselves but it does take longer to dial in your numbers. Overclock recovery was better than many AMD boards we've tested, but it seemed to have a random outcome - sometimes it wouldn't post at all, requiring a CMOS reset, while other times it would get stuck just before the main POST screen. However, most of the time we were met with the usual 'overclocking failed' message, which then allowed us to head back into the EFI.







Head over the page to see the Performance Analysis and Conclusion