In stock format with the BIOS defaults loaded, the MSI GD45 8D is much the same as any other board with our CPU, loading it with a default clockspeed of 1200MHZ and Turbo boosting to 3.9GHz on one core with the remainder set to 3.8GHz on our test Intel i7-3960X.

We know from experience that to reach the magic 5GHz figure (50 multiplier x 100 baseclock) we have to top the Vcore scales at a smidge over 1.5v which is not recommended for 24/7 purposes. Unfortunately, the MSI GD45 didn't want to play ball at this voltage and even though we raise the Vcore to 1.55v with days messing about with the various other voltages available in the ClickBIOS II we could not get it to even POST.



We had a little more success with 4.9GHz, getting into windows at least but even this clockspeed proved unstable during testing so we backed off further to 4.8GHz which passed 8 hours of Prime95 at 1.48 Vcore. Not a bad result for an entry level motherboard, beating the GIGABYTE UD3. It cannot however hold a flame to the big boys but for a motherboard costing half as much, it isn't what I would describe as a shameful showing.