Product Showcase MSI Z97I AC Gaming Motherboard
SATA ports -- MSI is equipping the board with a good four SATA3 ports. All of them come from the Intel PCH and that makes all of these ports 6 GBps capable. At ther rear IO there are also two eSATA connector, a complete waste if you ask me. These two would have been much more interesting as fill SATA3 connectors on the motherboard.
You will receive a WIFI module in this kit. This unit will offer you support of 802.11 ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and even Intel WiDi (Wireless Display) and by using a WiDi receiver (not included) you can watch movies on your TV without the need for any cables.
With the right router you could achieve 867Mbps. That's more theoretical though, still you'll have plenty of bandwidth available if you got your WIFI network up and running properly with the right gear. I have to say that the physical installation of this unit was annoying. You need to very carefully position and seat the unit and then at the backside of the motherboard you need to secure it with a screw. There has got to be a better solution for this MSI.
The CPU socket position remains a bit of a discussion point as bigger heatsinks could block the PCIe x16 slot. it would have been nice to see the PCH more to the left and the CPU socket more to the right. The board has a full 8-pin power feed for the processor located just behind the rear IO panel. We reached an overclock of 4800 MHz stable (4770K) with this few power phases and power leads. Sometimes you do wonder what the 32-phase motherboards are all about, eh?
You will get two DIMM slots offer support for dual-channel DDR3 memory up to even 3200 MHz (OC). You can install a maximum of 16 GB in total. XMP is supported, we'll show you this petit setup running at 2133 MHz.
Last bit. Here you can see the single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Bare in mind though that on a 17x17CM based motherboard space is an issue. Larger CPU heatpipe coolers can actually block that PCIe slot. But try to imagine the processor cooled with a nice all-in-one Liquid cooling kit from say Cooler Master, Corsair or NZXT, eh? As small as it is, this is high-end... even enthusiast grade hardware. We'll load the processor (4770K) up with some Corsaair H110 liquid cooling and we'll show you that this petite bit of hardware can run the Core i7 4770K at 4800 Mhz stable on all cores, booyah !
