MSI Z97 MPower Review

Performance Analysis

Stock speed numbers were pretty much on the ball and an overall score in our Media Benchmarks of 2,504 was the fastest result we've seen from a Z97 motherboard, although barely 100 points separates the top and bottom results at present. The minimum frame rate in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim was 1fps off the top spot and the same ahead of the rest of the pack - not vast differences here.

In the Shogun 2: Total War CPU Test it matched the top result again with a minimum frame rate of 30fps and was just a few megabytes a second off the pace in terms of SATA 6Gbps performance, where it matched the Maximus VII Hero. Power consumption was the lowest on test at idle and stock speed and the second lowest with the CPU under full load - in fact, at 120W, it was a full 16W lower than the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer.


Once we'd punched the CPU up to 4.8GHz, the idle and load power consumptions rise by 7W and 64W respectively - still not the highest on test so clearly the beefy power circuitry was doing quite a good job of staying efficient. The extra clock speed saw it score highly in our game tests - while it was second from bottom in the Shogun 2: Total War CPU Test, this was only by 1fps on the minimum frame rate. The best result came from the Z97 MPower's Media Benchmark score where at 4.8GHz, its result of 2,934 was the highest we've seen from any LGA1150 motherboard.

Conclusion

The question with the Z97 MPower is a similar one to the issues we had between the Maximus VII Ranger and Hero. The Hero was more expensive but did offer an illuminated chipset and audio section and some uprated components. However, the latter certainly didn't do much to improve benchmarking or overclocking so we left with the opinion that if these features were important it was a great buy, but the average enthusiast would likely want to take the cash saving from going for the Ranger instead and investing that money elsewhere.

The MPower is just as good-looking as the Hero and Ranger, perhaps more so if you're slightly bored of the red and black colour scheme, but the Hero and Ranger do offer more software features that will be useful to the average enthusiast, while the Z97 MPower focuses more on extreme overclocking. That said, it managed to max our CPU to 4.8GHz and posted the fastest result we've seen in our media benchmarks.

It's extremely tight in the £100-150 price bracket and it looks set to get even tighter and if we're honest, all of the boards we've reviewed so far have been very good. Sadly, the Z97 MPower didn't quite have what it takes to topple the Maximus VII Ranger as our preferred board here - it looks fantastic and will perhaps appeal to the extreme overclockers out there, but the Ranger is £10 cheaper, was slightly easier to get to 4.8GHz and has Asus's swathes of useful software features as well as matching MSI's Audio Boost with its own beefed up on-board SupremeFX audio. If black and yellow are more your thing though, the Z97 MPower is still a great board for the money.