MSI Z77 MPower Review: The XPower’s Little Brother
by Ian Cutress on January 26, 2013 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- Z77
- Overclocking
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the 1250W Gold Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Test Setup
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
Interestingly one of the best points about the Z77 MPower is the power consumption. It takes the top spot in all our loading tests, showing that OC oriented boards (like the MSI and ASRock Z77 OC Formula) are actually rather power efficient.
Windows 7 POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
While nothing improved for the boot time when we selected Fast Boot options, the Z77 MPower misses out on our artificial ‘12 second is a good POST time’ mark by under a second.
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waldojim42 - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - link
But once more, the audio codec means very little to me. Only the supported features. If Dobly Digital Live or DTS connect were supported, then the analog measurements would mean absolutely nothing to many of us gamers with a real 5.1 system....peckiro - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - link
Although I have built every system that I have run since 1999 I would certainly not consider myself a "Power User" in any strech of my very limited imagination. Heck, I get nervous when I play around trying to overclock, thinking that I'm going to brick the bios chip (although this board has two). I purchased this board for my latest build and I'm quite satisfied with it. My decision to check this board out for possible purchase was some usual propaganda (advertisement) I caught online. The ad mentioned that MSI had overclocked every single MPower board before leaving their factory to 4.6 GHz for 24 hours straight running Prime95 with limited cooling. So, I began to look at this mainboard as well as a host of others from the usual suspects Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock as well as a few from a couple of smaller players, as I do before every new build. After researching for some time I kind of took a shining to the MSI board, probably because of their overclock shtick. I do most of my hardware shopping on the Egg, and when they offered the this board for $180 WITH 8 Gigs of GSkill 1600 ram thrown in for free to sweeten the deal, I pulled the trigger. I dropped a 3570K processor on it and I'm pretty darned happy with the results. As I stated earlier, I'm too dense to overclock it myself so I let the OC Genie do it's thing. It's been running at 4.25GHz 24/7 for nearly 3 months now with narry a hiccup. I might have gone for a different board at $210, but I'm very pleased with it especially considering what I paid for it. At 4.25 GHz it idles at less than 10 degrees C. above ambient and no matter what I throw at it I have never seen temps over 45C with a Hyper 212 EVO. Of course your milage may vary. This board runs exactly like I want a mainboard to run, stable, stable and again, stable. If your looking to build a Z77 system you may want to consider this board, especially if you can get a helluva deal on it.cjmurph - Friday, February 1, 2013 - link
I've owned this board for about 4 months now and I love it. Lots of useless but fun toys like being able to control it from my phone or tablet. Having the bios in windows is also nice. I've got a mild clock on it 4.6 on a 3770k and it runs cool and silent and has never crashed. Its a keeper.theone2030 - Monday, February 18, 2013 - link
Looks like a good and solid motherboard but i lean more towards Asus plus if you get the F2A85-V PRO FM2 AMD A85X you also receive a bonus Razer Kraken pro headset ! id say thats a sweet deal if you ask me :)http://event.asus.com/au/2013/FM2/