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
Metro2033
Metro2033 is a DX11 benchmark that challenges every system that tries to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 2560x1440 with full graphical settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from 4 runs.
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Using the in game benchmark, Dirt 3 is run at 2560x1440 with Ultra graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.
GPU Results
The MSI Z77 MPower always seems a little varied in the results, although it is never too far off the top in terms of actual percentages. For three-way 7970s, due to the x8/x4/x4 PCIe 3.0 configuration rather than the x8/x8/x4 PCIe 2.0 of the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, we see it excel here – in order to get more performance from a tri-GPU setup, we need to move towards the PLX 8747 boards.
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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/