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MSI Big Bang XPOWER Motherboard

Overclocking:

The XPOWER has a feature called OC Genie. It’s supposed to be able to automatically overclock your machine with the push of a button. It’s a pretty neat concept that makes things incredibly easy for those feint of heart working in the BIOS. We didn’t have much luck with it during our testing, but more than likely that is due early BIOS and should be ironed out with further updates.

oc_genie

In addition to an easy button, the board also comes with a break away control box called the OC Dashboard. It enables you to view BIOS codes during POST and overclock in real time when the machine is booted into the operating system. It is somewhat limited in what it can modify, but it is still more than enough for some decent overclocking and making fine tune adjustments to your existing overclock from within Windows. Any serious overclocking will still need to be done from within the BIOS as there are far more voltage options there.

oc_dashboard

During our testing we were able to easily get our i7 up to 4.0 GHz. We started to become limited by how much further we could go, due to thermal issues. The GlacialTech cooler that we were using wasn’t able to sufficiently cool it at higher overclocks. If we had a more extreme cooler installed, the overclock could have been held for continuous use without worry of premature hardware failure.

cpuz_4ghz

The quality of parts that the board is built with really makes quite a difference. We had difficulty obtaining the same overclock using a Gigabyte board in an earlier review. This is one of those instances of getting what you pay for. You wanted raw performance, you got it.

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7 Comments... What's your say?

  1. I would like to exchange links with your site http://www.techwarelabs.com
    Is this possible?

  2. Between $299 and $315. I suggest Newegg.

  3. could you tell how much to get this msi motherboard

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