MSI Z97 Gaming 5 Motherboard Review: Five is Alive

MSI Z97 Gaming 5 In The Box

A gaming branded motherboard has the opportunity of offer a different experience to other motherboard segments. PC Gaming is growing, partially fuelled by popular games and increased resolution sizes driving GPU sales, and MSI’s ‘Gaming’ ecosystem aims to cater for as much as the market as MSI can manage. From the motherboard perspective, aside from the styling, having gaming related box bundles can turn a regular purchase into one that users might suggest to others. The only downside of this is the cost – placing plenty of gaming extras might move the motherboard into a price segment it cannot compete in. At the super high-end, some motherboards get game bundles, but at $148 there is not much room to maneuver.

In the MSI Z97 Gaming 5 we have:

Driver Disk
User Guide
Rear IO Shield
Quick Start Guide
Cable Labels
MSI Gaming Door Hanger
MSI Gaming Series Case Badge
Quick Connectors for the Front Panel
Two SATA Cables
Flexi SLI Bridge
Audio Power Adapter

Here we come across another problem with Gaming motherboard bundles. Features like the door hanger and case badge are interesting to have, but ultimately do not add functionality to the system aside from promoting the use of MSI products. Only having two SATA cables is an oversight – while it caters for an SSD + HDD combination, the minute an ODD is added or a second storage device, more cables are needed. 

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:

Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU and a Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.

Test Setup

MSI Z97 Gaming 5 Overclocking

Experience with MSI Z97 Gaming 5

MSI’s overclocking regime starts with OC Genie for an easy one-button overclock. Our thoughts on OC Genie have been relatively consistent over the last few generations – offering only one automatic overclock is easy to use but for those users who want a bit more without manual overclocking, it might be a little short sighted.

Manual overclockers should be pleased with MSI’s BIOS adjustment for Z97, giving overclocking options in a nice ordered list compared to a run-on list with no order. The use of Simple/Advanced modes also helps.

In our tests, we found OC Genie on an i7-4770K to come up a little short. It offered a 4.0 GHz overclock, which is only 100 MHz above stock operation. With a multi-stage OC Genie, we might have seen 4.0 – 4.4 GHz for those CPUs that can perform. For manual overclocking, we achieved 4.6 GHz, although it must be noted that the stock voltage was quite high.

Methodology:

Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.

For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.

Overclock Results:

The high voltage at stock lead to a severe drop in power consumption if users are willing to adjust the voltage manually.