MSI Z87I Gaming AC Review

Test Setup

With the exception of ATTO, which we use to measure the performance of a motherboard's SATA controllers, all of our benchmarks use real applications that give you a great idea of how well a product fares when performing the tasks for which you're likely to use it.

We test with our own Media Benchmarks suite, which can be downloaded so that you can test your own system. It uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-Zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we benchmark the board running The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Total War: Shogun 2's DX9 CPU test and record the minimum and average frame rates.


Our benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase. We ran the memory at 1,600MHz so our results would be comparable to previous results in many of our benchmarks for CPUs that we're no longer able to test.

Motherboards:

• MSI Z87i Gaming
  
• EVGA Z87 Stinger
  
• Asus Maximus VI Impact
  
• MSI Z87I
  
• Asus Z87-A
  
• Gigabyte GA-Z87N-WiFi
  
• Asus Z87i-Pro
  
• Intel DZ87KLT-75K
  
• Asus Maximus VI Extreme
  
• MSI Z87-G45 Gaming
  
• Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
  
• Asus Maximus VI Hero

Common Components:

• Intel Core i7-4770K
  
• 16GB Corsair Vengreance Pro DDR3 1,866MHz
  
• PNY GeForce GTX 680 XLR8 2GB
  
• Corsair Pro Series Gold HX750 power supply
  
• 256GB OCZ Vector SSD
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Overclocked Settings:

MSI Z87I Gaming - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.26V
• EVGA Z87 Stinger - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.23V
  
• Asus Maximus VI Impact - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.23V
  
• MSI Z87I - 4.6GHz, 100MHz baseblock, 46x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.2V
  
• Asus Z87-A - 4.6GHz, 100MHz baseblock, 46x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.2V
  
• Gigabyte GA-Z87N-WiFi - 4.6GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 46x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.2V
  
• Asus Z87i-Pro - 4.6GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 46x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.175V
  
• Asus Maximus VI Hero - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.23V
  
• Intel DZ87KLT-75K - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.257V
  
• Asus Maximus VI Extreme - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.255V
  
• MSI Z87-G45 Gaming - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.256V
  
• Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H - 4.7GHz, 100MHz baseclock, 47x multiplier, 1,600MHz RAM, vcore 1.26V