MSI Goes Mini! Z87I Gaming and GTX 760 Mini ITX Gaming Review!

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

The memory layout is a dual slot design with capabilities of up to 16GB, possibly 32GB if 16GB DIMMs are supported, but I have yet to get any to validate this. The speeds are claimed to supprt in excess of 3GHz pending you have an IMC and DIMMs capable of these speeds. 

 

The rear IO is quite stuffed with many connectivity options:

The MSI ITX Gaming board employs once again the dragon design PCH cover along with the dragon design VRM coolers to keep things under control as far as thermals are concerned. The VRM and PCH sink are connected via a heatpipe, which allows both to stay cool even if covered by a larger cooler.

The VRM utilizes military class components to ensure the upmost stability and performance capability even under teh toughest loading environments.

 

GTX 760 Mini

 

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The Gaming series cards carry a theme of the dragon with crest and of course the card name. This one being the Mini ITX Version of the GTX 760, which as its name says shares size limitations to fit even the tightest Mini ITX chassis enclosures.

The rear like others we have seen carries in depth spec details for the Mini ITX 760 along with a image showing the card design.

 

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Here is what comes in the package which is admittedly pretty basic with a 6 pin to 8 pin PCIe adapter a DVI > HDMI adapter and the usermanual and install disc to round things out.

Overall we would recommend using a PSU that has at least a single 8 pin or 6+2 PCIe power connector to ensure correct support for the card as most any present PSU offers this.

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The card seen here is very small with the fan at its front taking up over 60% of the card surface area. The front is black with Red stripes and mostly matte with a glossy finish on the Dragon logo of the front shell.

The rear of the card is covered with a backplate  with select cutouts for taller components or pass through legs of components from the other side.

 

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The display connectivity is a bit different than we have seen on other Kepler based cards

• 1x DVI
• 1x HDMI
• 2x Mini Displayport

This connector arrangement works quite well as the mini displayport connectors can use adapters to any type of display connection we need. I wish Nvidia would employ such a connection array out of the box as this allows a much larger airflow pass through for cooling purposes.

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The Mini ITX 760 from MSI uses a single 8 Pin PCIe power connection to power the card which is seated on a custom made PCB from MSI.

The Dual SLI fingers are in place ready to run up to a 3 Way SLI configuration if you could or wanted to use such a configuration although this being a Mini ITX card means it was made to fit in the smaller builds which support only a single card. However with builds shrinking as a whole or maybe just for a custom look you could run three of these for a pretty powerful compact gamer.

 

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Popping the cooler from the card shows us everything this Mini ITX model has to push. the VRM using SFC chokes and Military class components to ensure strong and stable power delivery is available under heavy graphics loading.

the cooler backplate has integrated heatpads to allow the backplate to work as a heatsink for the rear mounted memory ICs

 

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The cooler itself has spots for extra memory IC’s should they want to build a 4GB model which I think would be really cool for surround or very high res gameplay.

Here you see the VRM components comprised of military class components for a super strong VRM solution.

The memory employed on the Mini ITX GTX 760 model are Elpida W2032BBBG which are spec’d for up to 6Gbps operation and thats exactly where the card is clocked at well actually 6008MHz to be exact.