MSI Z77-GD65 and a Z77 snapshot

Some of you may never have heard of the Z77 chipset, and are therefore wondering what exactly it is. Surprisingly this isn’t a chipset for a new CPU socket type, and is instead the third enthusiast chipset release on the 1155 socket (previously P67 and Z68). There will also be a Z75 and H77 chipset accompanying the Z77, effectively superseding the “old” H61 chipset used on entry-level boards.

The Z77 chipset brings with it some advancement in technology, but not enough to be considered the “upgrade” from an existing Z68 motherboard. Most of the changes include support for both PCI-E Gen 3 and a greater quantity of USB and SATA 3 ports. USB 3 is now native to the ‘Panther Point’ chip, meaning slightly improved performance will be seen, though for most people this is of little significance as USB 3 portable devices are typically limited by read / write speeds of the hard disk used before the bus limitations.

With native support for both SLI and CrossFire, the Z77-GD65 is sure to be popular among gamers. The full PCI-E 3 support will also mean the maximum possible performance from AMDs new 7970, along with the up and coming replacement for the GTX 580 from NVIDIA.

Unfortunately due to the limitations of the Z77 chip, SLI and CrossFire will force the PCI-E lanes to run at x8/x8, and any boards sporting a 3-way setup will run at an ever more constricted x8/x4/x4. However, This problem is negated by the fact PCI-E gen 3 has a maximum throughput of 1GB/s per lane, compared to the 500MB/s per lane found on PCI-E 2. This means the gen 3 setup is exactly comparable to a x16/x16/x8 PCI-E gen 2 setup.

Essentially the Z77-GD65 isn’t too far removed from the Z68 offerings already available. The main changes are those found in the new chipset, and that largely involves I/O without any real benefits to overclocking or CPU efficiency. We put this to the test and compared the new Z77 board with the “old” Z68. We found a margin of difference roughly around 1%-1.8%, hardly worth noting, and could be put down to margin of error between the software and each run of the benchmark tools.

Due to more and more operations and responsibilities now being moved onto the CPU, we really couldn’t justify moving over to a Z77 board like the GD65 unless you have the specific need for native (and greater) USB 3, SATA 3 or PCI-E 3. These technologies are good, but usually a handful of USB, two SATA and a BIOS update for PCI-E 3 is all your Z68 board needs in order to get you ready for Ivy Bridge.