MSI Z97M Gaming Review

Overclocking and EFI

We initially thought we were onto a winner as the Z97M Gaming booted into Windows and ran through a session of Prime95 and some of our benchmarks seemingly happy at 4.8GHz using just 1.26V. However, our video encoding test tripped it up half way through. In fact, we had to raise the vcore all the way to 1.285V to get things perfectly stable.

As such it was rather toasty but still within limits and a good ten degrees Celsius away from the CPU throttling. However, it's the highest voltage we've needed yet to get to 4.8GHz on a Z97 board. The EFI was MSI's usual slick affair with a red and black colour scheme that looks identical to that on the Gaming 7. It's clean and well laid out, although the OC tab is so full of features that you end up scrolling up and down quite a bit between frequencies and bus speeds and the voltages.

You can at least filter out of the rarely used features using a favourites menu though. The Hardware Monitor section features a very handy fan curve profile editor for the four on-board 4-pin fan headers and it did a good job of controlling our CPU fan. Hook up three further fans for your case and you've essentially got an automatic fan controller that can boost airflow based on temperature for quite idling and beefed up cooling under load.