MSI Z87 GD65 Gaming Review

I was torn between this and the ASUS ROG HERO VI. For £10 I think I'm going to go with ASUS mainly because of fan expert 3 or 2 i don't remember. Anyway it saves me money on a Fan controller that would be around £30 :P
 
I was torn between this and the ASUS ROG HERO VI. For £10 I think I'm going to go with ASUS mainly because of fan expert 3 or 2 i don't remember. Anyway it saves me money on a Fan controller that would be around £30 :P

Could always just set up the fans with voltage reducers to make it far far tidier?
 
I was torn between this and the ASUS ROG HERO VI. For £10 I think I'm going to go with ASUS mainly because of fan expert 3 or 2 i don't remember. Anyway it saves me money on a Fan controller that would be around £30 :P

Yeah on board fans are for n000bs tbh mate.......
 
Just about to order mine, after a great review. I am also after a new GPU, in the next few months, when money allows. The question is: MSi claim that you will get a bigger boost if you use one of their branded cards, does anyone know if this is just marketing hype or there is some basis to it?
 
^I don't see why that couldn't be true. Any brand can achieve that with a bit of tweaking and optimizing.
 
Love the look this board. My Z77a-GD65 is a great board and its no surprise this one reviewed so well. I don't know if I missed it in the review but does the board do offset overclocking? The Z77 didn't have it.

Considering this board, Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H or Asus Sabertooth at this stage for my build. Was also thinking of Asrock Extreme 6 but not sure.
 
From experince I find get a small boost thing I would recomend about it you seem to get less hicups or errors just seems to work smoother if that makes sense. So I would say go for an MSI card if you have the board plus they make V good cards.
 
Hate the look of this board.

Now I know it's probably all that you had time to review, but it's a pity this board wasn't compared against boards in a similar price range aimed at a similar audience.

I'm also surprised that it scored so high in terms of value. It's presumably a motherboard aimed at gaming and yet in the review you pointed out that generally the motherboard makes less of an impact than the cpu and gpu. So from a gaming perspective how does it justify being 50% more expensive than the Gigabyte reviewed while producing almost the exact same results?

Also other reviews seem to suggest that the network on this board uses more cpu resources that the other boards. Did you find that?
On top of which the whole network thing seems like marketing hype. All it can do is traffic prioritisation on that PC, it can't speed up your network or internet connection. So yeah, if you're downloading a BT or streaming TV while also trying to play an online game then yes your ping may suffer. But what sort of n00b does that? It's not gonna help if your housemate is in his room download bit torrents while his girlfriend is streaming a video from Netflix.

I'm also curious about how you reach all the newly positioned buttons if you have a double slot graphics card in the bottom slot? Surely they'd be better up neat the RAM slots or something?
 
I'm also surprised that it scored so high in terms of value. It's presumably a motherboard aimed at gaming and yet in the review you pointed out that generally the motherboard makes less of an impact than the cpu and gpu. So from a gaming perspective how does it justify being 50% more expensive than the Gigabyte reviewed while producing almost the exact same results?


Um they are the same price?
 
The SATA ports, on-board buttons and killer Ethernet didn't seem to help it in gaming performance, which is surely what a 'Gaming' board is all about?

Also the KillerNIC seems to be more trouble than it's worth. You should get a discount for putting up with it.
 
The SATA ports, on-board buttons and killer Ethernet didn't seem to help it in gaming performance, which is surely what a 'Gaming' board is all about?

Also the KillerNIC seems to be more trouble than it's worth. You should get a discount for putting up with it.

No, obviously an ethernet port and buttons aren't going to make a CPU run faster. The buttons are there for convenience and the ethernet port ensures a more solid ethernet connection and reduce lag (granted it works properly). The Sata ports are there so you can add more drives.

No offense mate, but it seems like you just want to bash the board. That, or you just know very little about motherboards (in which case you still shouldn't bash if you don't know what you're talking about).
 
The SATA ports, on-board buttons and killer Ethernet didn't seem to help it in gaming performance, which is surely what a 'Gaming' board is all about?

Also the KillerNIC seems to be more trouble than it's worth. You should get a discount for putting up with it.
That's not exactly true...
Sure, a motherboard doesn't improve gaming performance, because that is what GPUs are all about (and CPUs a little bit), but the Gaming board does have some handy features.
The onboard switches are actually really handy, the more SATA ports means more options for storage (to put games on).
Motherboards aren't meant to give you better performance in games, it doesn't work that way, but it can hold handy features to make the gaming experience better :p

No, obviously an ethernet port and buttons aren't going to make a CPU run faster. The buttons are there for convenience and the ethernet port ensures a more solid ethernet connection and reduce lag (granted it works properly). The Sata ports are there so you can add more drives.

No offense mate, but it seems like you just want to bash the board. That, or you just know very little about motherboards (in which case you still shouldn't bash if you don't know what you're talking about).
I give your comment 5/5 TinyTomThumbs! :lol: (yes, I think we should keep using these, thanks for posting them Feronix xD)
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So why call it 'Gaming' and not just the Z87-GD65?

A little confused why the Asus MVIE got slated despite holding a number of Extreme OC records because it didn't add much gaming wise that cheaper motherboard did. But this board does almost the same thing and receives 10s across the board.
 
^^ Because there already is a Z87-GD65, that doesn't hold these features.

And you should read the review dude... The Z87-GD65 Gaming killed the d3hp in benchmarks :p
Did you even read the review of the Z87-GD65 Gaming.
Also Tom had major BIOS issues with the Maximus VI Extreme, and the GD-65 gaming got to the same clockspeeds
 
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^^ Well, not really killed, but well worth the £50.
AIDA64, SiSoftSandra, wPrime95 (mainly this one).
Especially the stock performance is really good.

Also keep in mind that the D3HP "only" managed to get 4.6GHz, and the GD65 Gaming managed to boot on 5GHz, and get to run the tests at 4.8GHz. If you're overclocking the GD65 Gaming would be better too.
 
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