MSI Z97S SLI Plus Review

Overclocking

As you shed heatsinks, MOSFETS and power phases, it's usually anyone's guess as to how a £100 motherboard fares compared to a £150 model.

We set our sites on 4.8GHz with our Intel Core i7-4770K (we'll be refreshing our test setup soon to use a Devil's Canyon CPU) with only one motherboard so far failing to hit 4.8GHz in the Z97 crowd.

We were initially worried when at 1.28V, we were met with a bluescreen after a few seconds in our video editing benchmark, and the same again albeit nearly at the end of the benchmark at 1.29V.

In the end 1.31V resulted in stability at 4.8GHz - a fair bit more than we've needed on average but it got there and with temperatures just about tamed by our Corsair H80 too.

EFI

Despite retailing for just over £100, MSI has still equipped the MSI Z97S SLI with a familiar-feeling EFI to the likes of its Gaming and MPower boards. In fact, many of the pages and settings look identical, albeit lacking a few extra options.






Even the hardware monitor section is the same and you can tweak the fan curve profile for 4-pin fans in the same way you can on the Gaming 5 and Mpower examples we've seen, plus there's also a favourite options section, overclocking profiles and MSI's easy-to-use BIOS flashing tool, MFLASH as well.