MSI Z97M Gaming Review

Performance Analysis

There's not a great deal to write home about as far as stock speed numbers go as there's actually very little difference between most of the Z97 boards we've tested so far. Its overall score in our Media Benchmarks of 2,470 was mid-table as were its minimum frame rates of 96fps and 30fps in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Shogun 2: Total War's CPU Test respectively.


There are no additional SATA controllers save for the eSATA ports, so its Z97 all the way here and you won't see much better than 542MB/sec read and 520MB/sec write speeds either. Being a micro-ATX board, there's clearly less PCB going on here and as such the Z97M Gaming posted some fairly low power consumption numbers. However, once we'd overclocked it to 4.8GHz with a comparatively hefty vcore of 1.285V, it posted the highest load power draw on test of 197W, despite offering the lowest at stock speed.


The extra grunt gave it a good boost in our Media Benchmarks too. The overall score of 2,846 wasn't the highest, though, and the similarly-priced ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer managed over 2,900 although in percentage terms this probably isn't worth worrying about. The rest was a similar story - the extra clock speed made a significant difference, but the Z97M Gaming didn't hold a significant advantage anywhere.

Conclusion

There's plenty to like about the MSI Z97M Gaming and very little to flag up as a potential problem. It's a very solid board with plenty of enthusiast-friendly features, all apart from overclocking, where it needed a fairly hefty vcore to get to our CPU's maximum 4.8GHz. As such, there are better options in the full-size board market such as the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer or if you can spend a little more MSI's Gaming 7 or Asus' Maximus VII Ranger.

However, we'll also be looking at Asus' Maximus VII Gene soon as well as Intel's Devil's Canyon CPUs too so if overclocking is important, then we'd suggest hanging on for a week or two till the dust settles. That said, if you're in the market for a cheap Z97 micro-ATX board but thinking of only applying a small overclock or learning these dark arts in the future, the Z97M Gaming is excellent value, looks great and has a top-notch EFI.