MSI Z87I Review

Overclocking

The EFI on the MSI Z87I lived up to most of the competition's latest efforts, with most of it being easy to navigate and providing all the usual settings under the OC section. There's also a pretty handy hardware monitoring section that allows you to tweak target temperatures and fan profiles while everything from current CPU temperature and frequency to RAM speed and BIOS version are all displayed on the home page.


We applied our usual settings of 1.27V to get to our usual stable 4.7GHz with our trusty Core i7-4770K. However the CPU quickly overheated, something which is usually a sign of lacklustre power circuitry. The result was similar to the majority of LGA1150 boards we've tested so far, few of which have been happy to get to 4.7GHz, but a few have been able to push past this point. We knocked back the vcore to try 4.6GHz and bottomed out at 1.2V while providing enough juice for the system to be stable under Prime95's small FFT test. It's not a poor result by any means - just a small limitation in overclocking potential, but we are talking about a sub £100 mini-ITX motherboard here afterall.

Performance

We've seen plenty of variation in our Media Benchmarks with Z87 motherboards and the Z87I was no exception. It posted one of the better multi-tasking scores, but mediocre results in the other two tests meant it came second from bottom overall, although it was less than 200 points off the top spot - not too much of an issue. It was also fairly slow in both our game tests too, although only by a couple of frames per second.


These results saw hefty improvements once the CPU was cranked up to 4.6GHz, although the overall score in the Media Benchmarks was actually the lowest on test. Again this was only by narrow margins, but the trend continued in the game tests too. Thankfully there's nothing to worry about where SATA speeds are concerned - read and write speeds of 536MB/sec and 501MB/sec are only a little off the pace of the fastest boards we've tested. A consolation to the performance figures is that the Z87I was one of the most power-frugal on test with both idle and load results near the top of the graphs.


Conclusion

There are, admittedly some concessions tied in to the attractive price tag of the MSI Z87I. Performance isn't stellar at stock speed or when overclocked and layout is a bit awry in places.

However, the performance is never worryingly low and overall there's little else not to like with the Z87I. It snaps at the heels of far more expensive boards in the overclocking department and with WiFi and a great EFI all part of the package, the Z87I a very attractive proposition for a mini-ITX gaming system. The fact that it costs around £30 less than the Asus Z87I-Pro makes it particularly good value too.