MSI Z87 Mpower Motherboard

Here we see all of the accessories we get with the MSI Z87 Gaming:

Here you can see that the slot layout which as I said already is very similar to the Gaming series boards which allows for dual triple slot cards to easily be used or even better MSI Twin Frozr cards to be placed in here which will have a nice air gap to allow more efficient cooling and an overall better running machine.

The drive connections are plentiful as the Z87 chipset offers up to six drives at SATA 6G Speed capability. The full six are employed here although one will be non usable if you utilize the mSATA port. The other two are fed by a 3rd party controller from ASMedia model ASM1061 and support up to SATA6G speeds but do not support the Intel RST RAID or any sort of raid set and are meant for simply single drive usage, so these would probably be good for just standard storage drives or optical.

The rear IO is quite stuffed with many connectivity options:

Here is the VRM area, this is where you can see all of the Military class components at work to keep your hungry CPU fed especially when overclocking. Having a strong VRM is important to ensure that not only does the power get there but the right amount and that it is regulated properly according to loading and also other conditions.

The VRM is fed by a Dual 8 PIN ATX connector setup which is way more than enough to feed even the most power hungry CPU combination even under LN2 loading.

BIOS Overview

Click BIOS 4

 

 

Testing & Methodology

We’ve expanded our testing suite considerably since the X79 chipset release, and will continue to use the same methods for most of the motherboards and CPU’s we test. In the interests of thoroughness and accurate results, we run each test at least three times, and some tests more than that. We average the total of all the tests from each benchmark then report the average here.

The OS we use is Windows 7 Pro 64bit with all patches and updates applied. We also use the latest drivers available for the motherboard and any devices attached to the computer. We do not disable background tasks or tweak the OS or system in any way. We turn off drive indexing and daily defragging. We also turn off Prefetch and Superfetch. This is not an attempt to produce bigger benchmark numbers. Drive indexing and defragging can interfere with testing and produce confusing numbers. If a test were to be run while a drive was being indexed or defragged, and then the same test was later run when these processes were off, the two results would be contradictory and erroneous. As we cannot control when defragging and indexing occur precisely enough to guarantee that they won’t interfere with testing, we opt to disable the features entirely.

Prefetch tries to predict what users will load the next time they boot the machine by caching the relevant files and storing them for later use. We want to learn how the program runs without any of the files being cached, and we disable it so that each test run we do not have to clear pre-fetch to get accurate numbers. Lastly we disable Superfetch. Superfetch loads often-used programs into the memory. It is one of the reasons that Windows occupies so much memory. Vista fills the memory in an attempt to predict what users will load. Having one test run with files cached, and another test run with the files un-cached would result in inaccurate numbers. Again, since we can’t control its timings so precisely, it we turn it off. Because these four features can potentially interfere with benchmarking, and and are out of our control, we disable them. We do not disable anything else.

One thing to note is that we are revamping our testing method in order to better represent motherboard performance and offering to you guys the consumer. Also we want to make it an easier read for you without miles of endless charts. Please feel free to provide feedback on what you think as many benchmarks will be shuffled or removed completely.

Test Rig

Test Rig
Case	Open Test Bench
CPUs	Intel Core i7 4770K (Haswell – LGA1150 – Z87) Intel Core i7 3770K (Ivy Bridge – LGA1155 – Z77)
Motherboards	MSI Z87 Mpower Intel DZ87KLT-75K Z87 Chipset Motherboard ASUS Maximus V Formula Z77 Chipset Motherboard
Ram	GSkill TridentX 2666MHz
CPU Cooler	Swiftech 240mm rad custom loop
Hard Drives	Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB 10000RPM 6Gb/s Hard Drive
SSD	1x Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA III 6Gb/s SSD
Optical	ASUS DVD-Burner
GPU	Intel iGPU or Nvidia GTX 680
PSU	Thermaltake Toughpower XT 1475W Gold
Mouse	Tt eSPORTS Black Gaming Mouse
Keyboard	Tt eSPORTS Meka G1 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard

Test Suite

We will use the following applications to test the performance of the Z87 Chipset (Motherboard, Processor).

Benchmarks
SuperPi Mod 1.5
Wprime 1.55
PCMark 7
3DMark 11
Cinebench R11.5
X264HD
Truecrypt 7.1
Unigine Heaven 4.0
Metro 2033
Batman Arkham City
Sniper Elite V2

PCmark 7

First up is PCMark and, just like the gaming series board this one seems to come alive when overclocked as it blows away the Intel board at computation with the same configuration.

3DMark 11

Discrete GPU

Switching over to a discrete card, you can see that performance can improve on the Physics end which is rendered on the CPU. However, when it comes to overall discrete graphics performance, the gain is marginal as cards simply cannot reach the limit of the PCIe 3.0 controller on Ivy Bridge, let alone Haswell.

SuperPi

This tests single threaded performance and clock efficiency by processing digits of the number pi. Going from the previous gen Z77 to Z87 yields a nice efficiency jump clock for clock, and as BIOS versions have had time to mature we have seen performance become more refined and start to deliver competitive results even besting the Intel solution even at stock settings.

Wprime

WPrime is similar to Superpi, but is multi core aware and you can set the core count. We used 8 threads to take advantage of the 4770K’s HyperThreading ability. Here you can see that the efficiency in multi core processing improves as you can see a pretty nice gain going from Z77 to Z87, and even more so when overclocked. We are quite excited to see what this platform can do as we get our hands on more boards to test real world performance.

On the Mpower I found that the stock performance bested Intel by a nice few steps but at overclock the Intel pulled ahead so maybe a little more tuning in the works for MSI.

Cinebench R11.5

X264HD

Transcoding has become more popular now and the latest Sandy Bridge processor added support for AVX instruction for faster video transcoding. With that you can see that going from Ivy Bridge to Haswell can net you some very good gains, especially a 2FPS gain on 2 Pass. This tells us that overall optimizations to the new platform are present and working very well. The Mpower pulls a nice lead here ahead of the competing Intel reference platform and possibly even topping the Xpower on this test which speaks very well to its efficiency.

Truecrypt 7.1

TrueCrypt is a real world application that gives a good indication of the true performance of our latest processor. Here the new Core i7 4770K puts some definite room between itself and the outgoing 3770K with over a 22% performance increase, which means in the same time you can get a lot more work done. Here with the Mpower you can see a nice jump at both stock and overclocked settings.

Unigine Heaven 2.5

Unigine Heaven is a benchmark program based on Unigine Corp’s latest engine, Unigine. The engine features DirectX 11, Hardware tessellation, DirectCompute, and Shader Model 5.0. All of these new technologies combined with the ability to run each card through the same exact test means this benchmark should be in our arsenal for a long time.

Discrete GPU

Unigine Heaven on a discrete GTX 680 gains about a single FPS, probably just due to the expanded performance with the overclock. For the most part, however, recent platforms are so efficient that there simply is no bottleneck for current gen card models. The Mpower sees a small increase here but not huge as graphics performance simply has not reached a level to where it will max out the bandwidth available on PCIe Gen 3 platforms.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 this time around shows max FPS falling but overall averages higher as the Mpower shows very good stable high Average FPS numbers due to its tuning and capability to maintain higher overall stable FPS numbers which should ensure better smoother gameplay.

Batman Arkham City

Discrete GPU

Discrete GPU results for the Mpower are very nice as the averages once again show a gain and yield what would be a much stronger result with better overall performance.

Sniper Elite V2

Discrete GPU

Once again we see a drop in max FPS but a gain in average which means that consistently the Mpower will deliver a more stable FPS level while not having as many peaks or jumpiness.

Our Final Thoughts

MSI once again offering multiple levels of offerings even within the same product category and with the Mpower it happens to be a more value oriented overclocking board.

The Z87 Mpower is a very impressive board in its own right as its value/features quotient makes it a tough to beat offer for most users. Yes there are lower priced boards that can overclock but to have an overclocking focused board with select components and loads of features including WiFi/BT 4.0 all in one package that really is not represented by any other offering I have seen to date.

This board will be just at home on a test bench as it would blasting away at your favorite games so if your looking for an awesome dual purpose board for your next build be sure to check out the Z87 Mpower.

Pros:	Cons
Killer E2205 High end Audio Boost Solution V-Check Point Strong VRM with Military Class Components Unique Dragon Styling Sound Blaster Cinema Compatibility Gaming Device Ports new clean UEFI with some cool options mSATA for onboard SSD Discharge Jumper for effortless clearing WiFi/BT 4.0/WiDi Module	No Ability to adjust Multiplier via Direct OC Buttons