Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Sickening... that's the key word in this review. It is sickening how much performance and features you can squeeze out of something this small, I love this! You could build an intensely small PC based on a small ITX chassis and then gain the major performance of the Core i7 4770K (or any other 4th Generation Intel Core processor). Then you can tweak it as well as any enthusiast class motherboard. Next to that MSI upgraded this Gaming edition with the KillerNIC and AC Wifi. Then they redesigned the looks and obviously we can't forget about all the other features. 17x17cm and still being able to connect 5 SATA 6G storage units for example. Something so small offer so much power, incredible. Overall from any point of view the Z87I Gaming AC from MSI has been done right. We do need mention one "issue" though. The location of the CPU socket can be problematic of you mount a somewhat bigger cooler. It could block the PCIe slot. Keep that in mind. But a board like this simply deserves some kind of liquid cooling as far as I am concerned. 

So yeah, other then that remark, I have nothing but good to say, power consumption is low, it has all the features you wish for, including; a wide array of display connectivity, a Gigabit LAN jacks and then even AC WIFI and WIDI. Combined with the five SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly understand that a 17x17cm board can be this powerful and feature rich.

Even the baseline performance is at the level of enthusiast class Z87 motherboards, and when tweaking, well as you have been able to see, we reached 4800 MHz stable. That's similar results to the Xpower we recently reviewed, that's a 400 USD board my man. Tweaking and overclocking was overall a breeze as well, the newly revised ClickBIOS uEFI interface finally has become mature and I actually start to really like it. It's easy to navigate through with a mouse and a couple of new features like the monitoring pages just kick black booty. So pop a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4600 MHz range with a 4770K easily, push a little harder on voltages and 4800 will become in range. Remember though, Haswell processors, just like Ivy Bridge, are mind irritating to cool once you increase CPU voltage. For this review we used a Corsair H90 liquid cooler which does the job just fine. For this review we did produce all overclocked results at 4800 MHz with 1.325 Volts on the processor. Proper liquid cooling is the only way to go once you pass 4600 MHz with a wee bit of extra voltage on the processor (1.300~1.325V). The overall baseline performance is really good though, definitely a notch faster than Intel's reference board. Man, this little critter rocks. 

Aesthetics

Now I don't wanna sound like an idiot abroad, but how can you not like what you see in the photo above? An all black and red design, and even with the board stuffed to the brim with hardware the PCB remains clean looking. Combined with Military class V design components the Z87I series will offer you a high grade class motherboard with enthusiast options like, USB 3.0, WIFI, SATA3 ports and sure, the cutest and smallest little mainboard that actually looks real good. The looks for the graphics card cooler can be argued about, but truthfully... it does the job well as the GTX 760 remains silent and at operating temperatures of below 70 Degrees C.

Tweaking

We mentioned it in the first chapter of this conclusion already, but overall non-overclocked performance as stated is above the baseline of the reference Z87 motherboards we tested, with an offset here and there of course. If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking then just use the OC Genie in the BIOS and after a few seconds your motherboard will all of the sudden be mildly overclocked. A performance boost with very little extra power consumption as the CPU will now be throttled to 4200 MHz, which is admittedly a bit low. The tweaking performance of this motherboard is on par with what we expected. We got the 4770K processor rocking stable at 4800 MHz with the memory (XMP enabled) at 2133 very easily, and that's not bad at all. As stated in the introduction, Haswell processors run hotter when overclocked opposed to Sandy Bridge, reaching 4600~4900 MHz might be easy to accomplish with the motherboard, but you'll find yourself needing juice in the 1.300 Volts range of the processor and that requires some serious cooling. So be prepared for processor heat. Proper liquid cooling definitely deserves a recommendation here alright. Or perhaps some delid action?

Final Words

Handy related downloads: 

• • Prime95
  • SiSoft Sandra
  • AIDA
  • CPU-Z
  • HWMonitor
    
    
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