 Welcome to my introduction of the OC certified concept featuring the MSI Big Bang Z77 M-Power. Now I'm going to quickly explain the difference between what we've seen in the past and what we are seeing now because they are incredibly different. In the past we've seen military class components, high quality components that are optimized for overclocking, optimized for performance, all of that good stuff. We've seen digital power phases and you know, golden capacitors and all kinds of crazy stuff in the past before from not only MSI but everyone. But OC certified takes all of that, theoretically this stuff should be good and steps it up to a whole new level. Every single board gets hand tested at an overclocked setting in a non-ideal environment with Prime95. That's right, a true enthusiast stability testing program. We're going to be having a look at this board in a real system, in a real case, with a real graphics card, running real games to see what kind of a benefit we get from the easy overclocking experience that an OC certified board enables and comparing it to a non-overclocked system to see what we can do with basically what amounted to about 15 minutes of overclocking and yeah, it was amazingly easy. Now we're going to start with a bit of a product tour here guys. So the Z77 Mpower is sort of a step up from the Z77A GD65. They actually bear some similarity to each other in terms of the overall layouts of these boards, the PCB designs and I apologize, I'm going to have to cheat a little bit. We're going to use a picture of the Z77 Mpower and a real board for the GD65 because the Mpower is in that system over there. So the PCI Express slot layout is exactly the same, however on the Mpower you see some significant improvements. So number one is that it does include wireless connectivity, what both WiFi and Bluetooth. It also has a beefier 12 phase hybrid, there it is, hybrid digital power design which the GD65 does not, it is using only an 8 phase design so the digital hybrid power design allows higher power efficiency, faster power transmission speed, has a programmable microprocessor inside and is optimized for extreme overclocking. Okay, it has better cooling, not significantly better cooling but it does have better cooling, it's got a super pipe whereas the GD65 did not. It has I think a way better color scheme especially because it matches that GTX 680 lightning that I've got in there. I'm going to pull off the side panel later and show you guys, it's outstanding. It has a thicker PCB which basically amounts to better power stability so again, better overclocking, 6 rear USB 3, there it is whereas the GD65 I believe only has 2 rear USB 3 ports, there they are. Okay, and it also has total fan control so all the fan headers are using PWM connectivity and finally it is Windows 8 certified. Now some of the similar things are the onboard buttons, OC Genie as well as V checkpoint so that means you can use your multi-pedometer to actually check the voltages, post LED readout as well as their multi-bios switch which has saved my bacon on this exact board when we had a power outage while we were flashing the bios. All we had to do was switch to the other bios and we were good to go. So overclocking this 3770K was easy peasy. Basically all I did was adjust the CPU ratio, turn off some of the automatic turbo controls and what nots, ask my camera very nicely to focus on the screen for me, change the memory to DDR3 1600 megahertz, CPU core voltage to 1.225 volts and that was it. Now all we got to do is boot into Windows and see if we are stable. Now for the GPU because I was able to overvolt the core I was able to get a plus 236 megahertz on the GPU boost for that lightning GTX 680 so that's where a lot of that extra performance is going to come from. Validating your overclock is essential. There's a ton of tools out there. I still use Prime95, I know it's a little bit old fashioned but 8 threads of Prime95 running for 24 to 48 hours. You can make sure you use CPU-Z to validate that you are running at the clock speed that you think you're running at and you can use real temp GT in order to make sure that your temperatures are acceptable. Would I rather have a liquid cooler on this particular setup and get those down to closer to 70 to 75 degrees? Yes, however 85 degrees under an artificial load isn't going to kill it because you'll never see temperatures like this in a gaming environment or even when you're rendering video. So I think that pretty much wraps it up for how to get your board running at 4.6 gigahertz which is what they validated out at the factory. So let's go ahead and do some testing now. Now I'd like to introduce the tests that I'm going to be running. We're going to keep things pretty simple. We're testing a core i7 3770K against another 3770K but this one overclocked so there's no difference in architecture here so we're just going to run a couple simple benchmarks. We're also testing a GTX 680 against a GTX 680 so again no architectural change so we're just going to do a couple quick benchmarks to see what we gain by using overclocking optimized or certified components versus ones that aren't. So if you guys don't already know the difference between the GTX 680 Lightning, the one in here with the massive heat pipes all over it as well as the dual fan cooler and just generally beastliness that it's got going on is more than anything else the fact that it supports triple over voltage so that means you can actually overvolt the GPU core unlike a reference GTX 680. This enables better overclocking and better stability and it also runs cool due to the fact that it's got the awesome full card backplate as well as again all the heat pipes and the beastly cooler that it's got going on. I should run you through the rest of the test bench so we've got crucial ballistics tactical tracer DDR3 memory going on in here which looks amazing. There's those PWM phases for the motherboard that light up when it's under load so we are playing a game so that's why those are all lit up and the memory is going nuts as well. There's our big bang board so I'm sorry I can't get you guys a better view of that. We're using a simple air cooler from Be Quiet, it's not even particularly loud and we've got an OCZ ZT750W power supply and we're running off of a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe SSD. So the configurations we'll be testing are stock 3770K with a stock GTX 680 versus what we get with our quick overclock on the 3770K with the OC certified board and our maximum overclock we were able to achieve on the GTX 680 Lightning Edition. See what we gain from a few minutes of overclocking. For tests we'll be keeping it really simple. Prices 2, the Elder Scrolls Skyrim and doing a 1GB video output test converting to Windows Media Video and rendering. So that's non-overclocked stock settings as well as with the overclocked CPU, it's not overclocked now, and the overclocked Lightning GTX 680. So it's conclusion time and just for a lark I'm going to experiment with overlaying my performance graphs instead of just talking about them and pointing the camera at them. So basically this test system is pretty beast and what benefit do we get from having our overclocked graphics card and overclocked CPU? Well the answer is it depends on the situation. So for example in Prices 2 you can see the performance difference between our overclocked system and our non-overclocked system is only about 2 to 10%. So what this tells me, because most of our overclocking was done with the Mpower motherboard is that Prices 2 was not particularly CPU limited. So fascinating, so the GPU was more of a factor holding it back and the GPU clock speeds didn't make that much of a difference so it's possible that the difference in performance could be more to do with the memory. The Lightning Edition card didn't overclock that much on the memory, only a few megahertz. So once we moved on to Skyrim you can see we see a significant performance difference about 15 to 20% depending on whether you look at the minimum or the average frame rates. That means that this overclocked, certified quick overclock that we did is yielding us an enormous gain in performance that usually is reserved for upgrading to an additional CPU. Now can you achieve this overclock on something other than a Big Bang Z77 Mpower? The answer is probably you can. However this one is validated and this one is ready to go so it's pretty much guaranteed out of the box as long as you don't get a total dud CPU. Now for our quick video rendering test we saw a 10% improvement in performance so that indicates to me that the CPU is faster and we will therefore save time if we are doing anything CPU intensive. So in conclusion there's not much going on here in terms of the unexpected. Intel CPUs are fast, overclocking makes them faster and I hope you guys have found this to be educational and informative, especially about MSI's new OC certified concept. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos.