Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
MSI has been on a winning streak with their Gaming series. The overall looks, design, component selection and features per motherboard are pretty good. Add to that the work that has been done on their UEFI Click BIOS lately and yeah, they have a very complete offering. The Micro-ATX Form factor is interesting, but not as interesting as Mini ITX. As such it suits in-between ATX and Mini-ITX, and that is a bit of a weird form factor to operate in. But with a relatively small motherboard of 24x24 CM you do get the option to run multiple graphics cards this way. Add to that a more advanced power circuitry and some extra feats and MSI again seems to have a winner on their hands. Another added benefit is that you can tweak it as well as any enthusiast class motherboard, we reached 4800 MHz by simply enabling a 48 Multiplier and 1.3 Volts on the processor. The rest we left at automatic. Overclocking was that simple. Next to that MSI upgraded this Gaming edition with KillerNIC. So yeah, it all is impressive really. Power consumption is low, it has all the features you wish for, including; a wide array of display connectivity, a Gigabit LAN jack, six SATA 6Gbps ports and so on.
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
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, SATA3 ports and sure, the cutest and smallest little mainboard that actually looks real good.
Is anything missing ?
Yeah, where's WIFI ? Especially AC WIFI is getting extremely popular. It's a bit of a miss in my opinion. For the next round I'd like to suggest to MSI to drop the eSATA ports and integrate WIFI/WIDI. I mean with USB 3.0 who really uses eSATA these days ?
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 2400 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.
Final Words
Don't let the looks of this relatively small MSI Z87M Gaming motherboard fool you, this is enthusiast grade hardware with the usage of very high-grade class components. The boards not only looks sturdy, it really is a solid piece of hardware. The baseline performance and tweaking experience will be on par with any other brand though, that is the reality of these products anno 2014. But MSI did pimp up this motherboards with enhanced audio, KillerNIC, six SATA 6G connector, OC genie, Status LED, ambient lighting LEDs, power buttons and well everything you need is there. Combine it with great build quality and good looks and the option to run two graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire and you'll be hard-pressed to not like this kit. We do miss WIFI and in specific IEEE 802.11ac, I feel that anyone with a high-end PC should upgrade their router to IEEE 802.11ac compatible as well as the motherboards having this WIFI as standard. The MSI Z87M Gaming motherboard is relatively small but remains great in performance, features and offers plenty of tweakability. We really like the latest implementation of the UEFI BIOS as that now has come to full cycle and works really well. Overall an excellent motherboard, just like the rest of the MSI gaming series. Defnitely a top pick.
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