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Benchmarks
We've seen this before; there is little difference between the boards. Overclocking does provide around 10 percent better scores.
The differences are not significant, although overclocking moves today's board from last into a tie for first place with a boost of less than three percent.
Only an unrealistically pinched scale would make the one percent difference look significant. It is perhaps worth noting that the test board's SATA 6Gb/s performance was lower when overclocked, although its USB 3.0 performance was a little higher.
Today's board is tied for last place in its stock trim on the DX9 basic settings, and it falls to dead last in DX11. Overclocking shifts it to first place under DX9, but fails to move the needle in DX11. In any case, the difference is less than one percent, which is hardly noticeable.
MSI's power consumption surfaces in the middle of the pack, though it drops a little while running Heaven. Saving power there is offset by higher usage under a pure CPU load like Prime95. This is especially true when overclocked, but it's worth noting that idle draw didn't budge. Just be aware that power use did fluctuate during testing.
The placing in our CPU temperature testing mirrors what we saw from power consumption. Over the long term, we wouldn't want to see readings in excess of 70 degrees Celsius, which is what the Pentium hit under Prime95. But we'd expect that additional tweaking or a better cooler could bring this figure down.
