MSI 970 Gaming Motherboard Review

Clearly, you might think, those overclocking figures demonstrate that MSI was horribly cautious when it set OC Genie 4 to overclock by such a pathetic handful of MHz. Well you might think that but there is method to MSI's apparent madness. The problem is that FX-8350 is a power-hungry CPU. At idle the test PC drew 80W at the wall socket which rose to 215W in the Cinebench CPU test. This is a rise of 135W, which is pretty much want you expect when a 125W TDP processor is working hard.

With OC Genie 4 enabled and the clock speed increased to 4.2GHz we saw the idle power draw rise to 100W and loaded power increase slightly to 220W. In other words OC Genie 4 has very little impact on power requirements, thanks to the use of stock voltage settings.

Manual overclocking revealed a completely different picture. At 4.4GHz the idle power draw was 145W and the loaded figure was 310W. That is a huge jump from the stock figures and makes decent cooling essential to avoid problems. The idle figure remained at the same level as we increased clock speed to 4.6GHz and then 4.8GHz, however the loaded figure stepped up to 320W and then 335W.

That's a hefty amount of power, and an obvious cost to the consumer, but the main consequence is that extra power inevitably results in extra heat.

As the power and clock speeds increase so too does the temperature of the CPU package and core. To take the extreme cases, at stock speed the package temp is 40 degrees and the core temp is 58 degrees. By any standards those are reasonable figures, especially when you consider they were observed with the cooling fans running in the range of 25-50 percent.

By contrast when the CPU was overclocked to 4.8GHz the figures increased to 64 degrees for the package (an increase of 18 degrees) and the core temp was 77 degrees (an increase of 19 degrees), and that was with the cooling fans running at full speed.

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