MSI Z87M-GAMING Motherboard Review

Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2014-04-07

MSI is pushing hard with their Intel Z87 lineup; the gaming series motherboards are getting the same love from the gaming community as the alike named graphics solutions. Combining stunning looks with durability and great performance retailing at a very competitive price; it really feels times are changing and a certain A brand seems to slowly loose it grips on the market. The MSI Z87M Gaming motherboard is a full blown Z87 chipset based mATX motherboard with hardly any compromises made to the design. Nevertheless MSI manages to undercut the prices of the main competitors gaming oriented board offerings.

Unboxing

The MSI Gaming motherboards are directly recognisable thanks to their dragon themed box-art and idem ditto looking heatsinks, especially the latter used around the voltage regulator modules are real pieces of art. As with all mATX boards, the box content is rather sparse: a backplate, a bundle of SATA cables and the manual and driver CD.

The black PCB and slots in combination with the red and black heatsinks are a stunning combination. Gamers not only want a reliable platform, but also prefer a great looking design to integrate in their precious gaming rigs.

The area around the LGA1150 socket is pretty clean: no abundance of insane amounts of phases & capacitors here; an 8 phase power design is all that is needed to feed the Intel Haswell processor generation, being it overclocked or not. The two over-dimensioned dragon shaped heatsinks keep the operating temperatures down for enhanced reliability and longevity during intense gaming sessions. On top of that MSI remains loyal to their Military Class Components, Super Ferrite Chokes and Dark Caps, what's in a name, should make these series build to last while being stressed in the most rigorous conditions.

A Closer Look Part I

Another shot of the power circuitry of the processor: an 8-pin power plug is located near the top of the PCB, another indication that this MSI design prefers full power stability instead of cutting back and opting to install a 4-pin power plug.

The 2 phase powered four DIMM slots support DRAM speeds over DDR3-3000MHz (OC) and a whopping total of 32GB can be installed on this mATX PCB motherboard. Near the 24-PIN ATX power connector a debug LED is located to quickly detect the culprit when things go wrong. Another touch of class are the on-board Power, Reset and MSI's patented OC Genie button. A simple press on the latter will overclock your K Skew processor to 4000 or 4200MHz, depending on the position of the below pictured OC switch. Sadly on our test sample this switch made no difference; either it was broken or the used BIOSes did not properly detect its actual set position to boost the overclock to 4200MHz.

The 7.1-channel High Definition Audio is provided by a Realtek ALC1150 Codec. MSI baptizes its audio solution as Audio Boost. The LED illuminated EMI shielded Codec chip linked to the OPA1652 amplifier and the throughout used High Quality Audio Capacitors will immerse the gamer in the game, movie or music.

A Closer Look Part II

The MSI Z87M Gaming has got as most micro ATX motherboards a total of six SATA 6Gbps ports at the end user's disposal, all natively controlled by the Z87 PCH Chipset. Naturally Intel Smart Response Technology, Intel Rapid Start Technology and Intel Smart Connect technology are supported; RAID support ranging from RAID 0/1/5/10 by the Intel Z87.

Two e-SATA ports can be found on the back I/O panel; both are controlled by the integrated ASMedia ASM 1061 chipset and are supporting transfer speeds up to 6Gb/s.

The red BigFoot KillerNIC LAN port is easily distinguishable on the back I/O panel. Hooked up to the BigFoot Killer E2205 network processing unit (NPU) it should allow you to game online with less lag. The included software bundle is a bit complex to setup. Though once properly dialed in the end user can e.g. prioritize bandwidth for gaming purposes. In theory all this is fine, though having experienced a lot of issues during the initial months of playing Battlefield 4 online it really makes me wonder. Wasn't it a better option to have chosen for a more simple but fully functional and cheaper Intel NIC solution? However brands tend to follow trends and the Killer NIC is finding its way even into the Gaming laptops...

For the rest we find on the back I/O Panel a combined keyboard/mouse port, 2 USB2.0 ports, a clear CMOS button, a total of six USB 3.0 ports, from which four are controlled by the Z87 Express chipset and two via a Renesas UPD720202 chipset. Two HDMI ports and one display port supporting a max resolution of 4096x2160@24Hz. Finally one optical S/PDIF port and the six audio jacks.

UEFI BIOS Screens

The Click-4-BIOS has evolved big time from the early Teletubbies variant we spotted in the P67 days, allowing easy and fast adjustments. Navigating is as always a personal taste; if one is used to e.g. ASUS BIOSes this one feels very awkward and vice versa. Even for its gaming series the UEFI gaming BIOS allows access to the most vital and even more settings to be adjusted.

RAM Compatibility and Specifications

RAM compatibility:

The RAM compatibility test is not alike as with the Overclocking boards test. No PSC, nor BBSE legacy DIMMs tested now. We just test the high speed kits we have at our disposal at the MadShrimps lab. The PC has to complete a SuperPi 32M and a X64HD encoding run. The MSI Z87M-Gaming board ran flawless with the XMP profiles loaded. Excluding the EOL Corsair 2800C11 kit...

CORSAIR 4 x 4GB 2666C10: PASS
CORSAIR 4 x 4GB 2800C11: is set at 2666MHz C11-13-13-31 2T, can be adjusted manually.
CORSAIR 2 x 8GB 2400C10 Vengeance Pro: PASS
GeIL Evo Veloce 2 x 8GB 2133C10: PASS
G.SKILL TridentX 2 x 4GB 2400C9: PASS
Kingston Predator 2 x 4GB 2400C11: PASS
Kingston BEAST 2 x 4GB 2400C10: PASS
Kingston BEAST 2 x 8GB 2400C11: PASS

SPECIFICATIONS:

Test Setup and Methodology

Especially since the release of Sandy Bridge, Intel's first socket 1155, most hardware vendors are no longer respecting the Intel specifications regarding the Turbo policy; most were imposing the same Turbo ratio to all the cores instead. This makes the lives of us the reviewers even harder as we needed to adapt our reviewing method. With Haswell nothing has really changed; one brand remaining loyal to Intel specs, the others boosting ahead.

For our stock tests we go out of the box and just go into the BIOS and load the XMP profile for our 16GB Dual channel CORSAIR Vengeance Pro kit. Both the Audio and LAN ports were disabled.

The hardware setup comprises out of:

Intel i7-4770K cooled by Noctua NH-U12S
Intel DZ87KLT Mainboard
ASRock OC Formula ( 1.51 bios )
ASUS Z87 MAXIMUS VI Formula ( 0039 bios )
Gigabyte Z87X-OC ( F5v bios )
MSI Z87 XPOWER ( 1.19 bios )
MSI Z87M-Gaming ( 1.2b bios )
16GB CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 2400C10 Dual Channel kit
ATI HD7970 GPU
CORSAIR AX1200 PSU
Western Digital Green Caviar 1TB HDD

Stock 2D Results

We always start the out of the box benchmarks with the single threaded SuperPi and the core crushing Wprime benchmark. SuperPi reveals a lot about how the BIOS engineers dialed in the board. The MSI G45 Gaming and the Gigabyte Z87X-OC Bioses got very tight DRAM timings and thus it is no surprise to see these boards leading the hordes. The MSI Z87M Gaming's performance is situated somewhere in the middle of the pack. Wprime tells the tale, the Intel Turbo is running in an enhanced state, keeping the cores in sync at the maximum Turbo multiplier. Free performance for everyone!

By using the AIDA64 bandwidth test, discrepancies in timings will become clearly visible. The MSI Bios team has gone though great lengths to recover from the Z87 XPower disaster. Far better memory compatibility all around, plus the efficiency is more than good enough to compete with the other brands.

The Z87M Gaming board is no slouch at all, mini in size, great in performance. The MSI Z87M is a great performer out of the box.

OCed 2D Results

Time to give these boards a run for their money on air; instead of just bumping up the CPU multiplier to 45X, we set the Rams at 2800MHz C11-13-13-31 2T and tightened the secondary and tertiary timings to max out the performance of the IMC.

i7-4770K@4500MHz
CORSAIR 2800C11-13-13-31 2T (tweaked from SPD C11-14-14-31)

Why only 4500MHz ? Well our retail CPU is not comparable with all the Intel ES CPUs we see popping up on most websites. Fooling people 5GHz daily can be done at a mere 1.3Vcore... great for those who have access to these samples. Most readers will be so utterly disappointed if their brand new CPU can't even reach 4600MHz stable at 1.3Vcore; maybe with one out of 100 retails you can manage the same speeds as the ES versions. Our i7-4770K retail is very average in voltage (1.2Vcore), however just gets too hot at anything over 4600MHz. Plus 4500MHz is more than OOOmph enough for daily usage.

Looking at the below benchmarks, this board has no problems at all to stay close on the heels of the rival's boards.

Conclusive Thoughts

MSI is playing hard ball with their Gaming series boards. Great looks, aesthetics, plus great component choice all bundled on a pro looking black PCB. That a micro ATX can stand its ground has been proven on the previous pages. Best of all MSI keeps on undercutting the prices of many of the rival's offerings. What more can one ask for?

During the testing the MadShrimps crew did not detected any discrepancies in performance, with the 1.2 BIOS, being it when being thrashed at the out of the box speeds. Or when overclocking the processor and the high speed dual channel Corsair Dominator Platinum memory.

Similar as with the Z87 G45 motherboard this little micro ATX board leaves a desire for more. With its Gaming series MSI has proven that things can be rectified in a rapid manner and mistakes from the past must remain a thing from the past. The performance is there, the looks even more and the amount of on-board features leave close to no option open. While not being a devoted fan of the Killer NIC LAN chips one can understand if one brand opts for it, that MSI has to follow a similar path. A decent foolproof Intel GbE chip and a WiFi controller could have been a more versatile option. Secondly the OC Genie function could have been also better implemented as there's plenty of room for improvement.

The MSI Z87M-Gaming micro ATX motherboard is a stellar performer. Being flexible versus the multitude of memory kits we threw at it. The enhanced Audio and the utilization of the Killer NIC are high on most Gamers' priority lists. Though the price remains another big determining factor. Especially the latter is a big plus for the entire MSI Gaming series. As these are retailing at very affordable prices. Combine all this with the Dragon Themed look and there's no more denying that MSI has got a winner on hand with its Gaming series motherboards. Therefore MadShrimps happily awards both the Value and Performance award to the MSI Z87M-Gaming motherboard.