Z77 mITX Round-Up: Five of the Best – MSI, Zotac, ASRock, EVGA and ASUS

MSI Z77IA-E53 Conclusion

My main criticism with the MSI Z77IA-E53 is similar to many of the other mITX motherboards on the market – the location of the socket on the board is a little insane.  By being right up against the memory slots and the PCIe slots, it means that we are restricted to the Intel specifications for coolers in the x-y directions, and we cannot have large GPUs with a backplate for a mITX gaming system.  Trying to fit the latest MSI Lightning GPU as well as an overclocked CPU that is not on an All-In-One liquid cooling system would seem like a tough ask.  The location of the socket leads to another issue – the placement of the CPU power connector.  As seen on other mITX boards with this configuration, the CPU power is found in an awkward place above the PCIe and near the rear IO.  This means any cable has to either stretch over the mITX board (bad for airflow) or stretch over a GPU.  Unless the PSU is coming from above, it can cause issues in building a system.

Socket placement aside, MSI have made other design decisions – by placing the on-board battery onto the back of the IO panel with adhesive should leave some PCB free for extra controllers or placement, but yet we get just the chipset standard.  One of the SATA ports is partitioned off into an mSATA/mPCIe slot, leaving the gap open from some additional functionality at the discretion of the user.  In terms of audio/network, we get a Realtek combo in the form of an ALC898 and the 8111E.  The rear IO is also a little baffling – MSI have gone with a HDMI and VGA port, compared to some other manufacturers going dual HDMI and DVI-I to cover all the bases.  Instead we get a ClearCMOS button on the IO, but no power/reset buttons or debug LED like on the Zotac.

Performance wise, the MSI stands up with the rest of the mITX boards in most of the tests.  Normally we see a motherboard with monitoring software fail in the DPC Latency test, but the MSI Z77IA-E53 kept under 200 microseconds easily.  The only serious downfall is an issue systemic with all MSI 7-series boards I have tested – the USB 2.0 speed.  For whatever reason, we get only 25 MBps read/write on this board, compared to the 30-34 MBps we expect and get on every other manufacturer.  This is not a deal breaker though.

In buying the MSI we get a nice looking BIOS and a good software package, but there needs to be something more to take my hard earned green – the wow factor of mITX is not enough, as every other manufacturer has that as well.  When I compare connectivity against the other motherboards that have dual HDMI, personally I sway over to them rather than the MSI.  The MSI is a nice board to play with, but it has one issue – the competition.