An update on the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC and the Oh Baby Rig

I've been meaning to do the Oh Baby! rig build post for a while but haven't managed to get to it yet as it's got  approx 90 pictures of building content so it's been on the backburner for a bit. As for the Gigabyte GTX 670, I popped in MSI Afterburner and overclocked the GPU to 1147MHz Core Clock and 1850MHz Memory Clock (3700MHz effective). I have yet to load Arkham City back up to do another benchmark, but considering it's performing at almost stock GTX 680 clocks, it should be a fair bit of an improvement over the out of the box clocks. I have yet to see if I can push the clocks any higher in terms of the core clock, but I know that with the memory clock of 1900MHz the card will crash, so 1850MHz seems like the stable limit for the most part. I may explore overclocking the core clock more though in the future, but for now it certainly is a good set of numbers. I also scaled back the Power Limit from 100% to 98% just so it doesn't overpeak the core clock. Hopefully I can get to the benchmark and Oh Baby! rig post by the end of this week though so stay tuned.

Gigabyte GTX 670

So I ordered a Gigabyte GTX 670 OC version (model number GV-N670OC-2GD) off of NCIX last week for 450 dollars after tax. It was a great deal cause I got free shipping, and 2 free games (Mafia 2 and Borderlands 2). For that price how could I go wrong? I needed an upgrade from my singular GTX 460 (if you read in one of my previous posts, I mention how my SLi config got ruined because one of my 460's died) so I decided to step up from it I would need a new 6xx series card. GTX 680's are a bit too overpriced in my opinion, and even though the new GTX 660 Ti's just came out and are 100 dollars cheaper, I wanted the 256-bit bus vs the 192-bit bus that the 660 Ti provides. That way I can be sure that I'll have a GPU that will perform rather excellent for the next couple of years. It's a shame I still have a sandy bridge processor (so I can't utilize PCI-E 3.0 speeds) but I'm sure the card will still perform extremely well.


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MSI Z77A-GD65 Motherboard

So I've been meaning to do this sooner but here we go. A brief overview of the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard. I won't be going too in depth as to absolutely everything thing on the board (with pictures anyway) but I will try to cover as much of the specifications as I can. First off, this is a Z77 chipset motherboard (which is the newest LGA1155 chipset revision as to this date). I have a personal preference towards MSI boards nowadays simply because I like their ease of access to overclocking, their UEFI interface on their BIOS, Winki (which is currently version 3 as of this article), their Military Class setup for all their components on their boards (uses solid capacitors, super ferrite chokes, highly conductive polymerized capacitors, and DrMOS), has PCI Express 3.0 on all their Z77 boards (has been available since their Z68A boards that were G3 labeled), and best of all, a CMOS reset button on the rear of the board. The CMOS reset isn't available on all of their boards unfortunately, but the Z77A-GD55, Z77A-GD65, Z77A-GD80, and Z77A-G45 (the Z77A version not the Z77MA version) all contain this button (which is located between the top USB/PS2 ports and the digital audio ports). I find this button useful because if you have a bad overclock and it doesn't get to the point where you can boot into the BIOS you can simply press this button with the system off and unplugged. Without having to open the case you have already reset the bios to defaults. Pretty handy I think. Some other manufacturers have also started putting this on their boards which is great, but I would still rather prefer MSI's other offerings. As for the Winki (currently version 3), if you're curious as to how it works or what it has for features, check out the dedicated page on MSI's website HERE.


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