MSI Z97 Guard-Pro Review: Entry Level Z97 at $110
by Ian Cutress on August 20, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- Z97
MSI Z97 Guard-Pro Conclusion
The motherboard industry is one of the most mature PC markets. We are now at a point where the main motherboard manufacturers have been in the market for long enough to understand their customer base and understand their own designs. As a result, even the most basic motherboard works as advertised, and issues seem few and far between. One might argue that reviews of these products end up merely like a checklist to see if everything works, because at the end of the day the reason why some motherboards are more expensive comes down to features and engineering. With a limited cost motherboard, there is controller comparison or functionality discussion – we typically end up with most of the software and the BIOS at the high end anyway.
The MSI Z97-Guard Pro does at least come across with a goal: to integrate into a system as part of a cheaper single GPU and Pentium G3258 build, or to form the base of a PCIe workhorse. That latter point is expressed on the art of the box, and indicates that with the right adaptors this motherboard can support six PCIe devices, particularly for Bitcoin mining. This comes from a PCIe 2.0 x4 and four PCIe 2.0 x1 slots, which totals all eight of the PCIe 2.0 lanes from the chipset. For multi-GPU users, there is no SLI here because of the second full length PCIe slot only being four lanes, but Crossfire (with limited bandwidth) is supported.
MSI also equips this board with six SATA 6 Gbps and six USB 3.0 ports, both from the chipset, as well as an M.2 x2 slot. When using the M.2, two of the PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and two of the SATA ports are disabled due to onboard switching of bandwidth. Both the audio and the network functionality are provided by Realtek, and the ALC892 ends up being a poor performer. The USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 speed is on par with other Z97 platforms, along with the 12-13 second POST time and 88 microseconds of DPC Latency. Power consumption is low, giving 141W at load in our setup. This makes sense given the lack of extra controllers onboard. The overall CPU performance is in the bottom part of our Z97 testing, which would suggest that the motherboard is best suited for an overclocked system.
The main two points where MSI falters comes down to offering 2.1 volts through the CPU in software and a tendency to lock up in the BIOS if the voltage is too low, not giving enough time to raise the voltage before becoming unresponsive. Overall the MSI Z97 BIOS is still improving for the better with the additions of the XMP button and fan control, which can only ever be a good thing. One might also point out that the lack of HDMI on the rear panel is an oversight, but I imagine that was left out in order to reduce license fee costs and DisplayPort is present to allow for three-monitor setups.
MSI’s biggest leverage is with the G3258 overclocking. The OC Genie will enable a +1.1 GHz overclock at the touch of a button, and our manual overclocking went all the way up to 4.8 GHz with a peak temperature of 80ºC, which is rather impressive for a low cost motherboard.
The MSI Z97-Guard Pro provides a nice base for a low cost Intel PC where Pentium G3258 overclocking combined with single GPU gaming, or non-PCIe bandwidth based compute, are important. For gamers on a budget, press the OC Genie button and pair it up with a USB DAC or PCIe sound card for a good all-around experience.
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wetwareinterface - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
It's assumed, if you're an enthusiast, you are upgrading your system to something in a medium priced offering that gives great bang for buck value with overclocking (i5/i7 k series paired with r9 290/780 dual xfire/sli), or are spending gobs of money to hang your ass over the bleeding edge (xtreme edition, socket 2011, quad sli titan z / crossfire 295x etc..). Enthusiast class hardware isn't on the low end of pentium or i3 even unless they are building an HTPC or a box for mom to surf on.austinsguitar - Wednesday, August 20, 2014 - link
okay do yourself a favor and buy a 120 dollar motherboard (10 dollars more.) anandtech... you keep disapointing me with these articles. for 120 you can get m.2 and sata express, sli, intel lan, and realtek 1150.... just look it up people. i dont know what anandtech is thinking these days...austinsguitar - Wednesday, August 20, 2014 - link
gigabyte z97x-sli. look it upDeath666Angel - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
"i dont know what anandtech is thinking these days..."Probably thinking that they are reviewing the products they get sent by the manufacturer. As always. You could say the same thing. You really don't need a big board to OC on Haswell. I have a AsRock Z87M Pro4 which I bought because it was the cheapest mATX 1150 board and I used it with a Pentium for my Litecoin mining machine. Now that fad is over I bought a 4770k and upgraded my aging i7-860 system with it. Am reaching 4.5GHz comfortably so far. It even has an Intel NIC.
Samus - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
Is this board the same as the Z97 PC Mate (with the addition of the M2 slot?) Looks almost identical.Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
No its not the same as the Z97 PC Mate. I believe the Z97 PC Mate is better, since it gives a 100mhz better ocSamus - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
How is the PC Mate better when it doesn't have M.2? The 100Mhz+ OC doesn't make sense to me...they both have 4-phase power and even the BIOSes are updated identically on MSI's site. Interestingly, though, the PC Mate uses an Award BIOS and the Guard-Pro uses an AMI.http://us.msi.com/support/mb/Z97_PC_Mate.html#down...
http://us.msi.com/support/mb/Z97_GUARDPRO.html#dow...
These boards are similar enough to get the same BIOS development.
wavetrex - Friday, August 22, 2014 - link
Why even bother putting "mining" in the article ? PC coin mining is dead.The difficulty has gone up so much due to all the ASIC's and FPGA's and simply TOO MANY people mining, that even with the most power efficient GPUs, you still end up losing money, electricity costing more than the tiny amounts that a PC is able to mine.
Time to move on people, the scam is complete.
RegorTejmar - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
The 4 PCIe X1 ports only use a single lane from the Z97 chipset. The connect them via a ASM1184 Hub/switch. The Z97 has 18 high speed IO slots. This Motherboard uses 6 USB 3.0, 4 PCIe to the 2nd x16 Slot, 1 PCIe to the ASM1184 (powering the 4 x1 slots), 1 PCIe for the Realtek LAN, and 2 that are either M.2 or SATA and 4 that are SATA.KAlmquist - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
So what happens to EIST when you overclock with this board? With schemes like EIST, the operating system adjusts the core frequency based on load. At lower frequencies the cores run at a lower voltage, which increases efficiency (performance per watt).On the Asus Vanguard B85 motherboard, which has a BIOS that looks suspiciously like the one on the MSI motherboard being reviewed, EIST stops working if you overclock. The core frequencies will still change like they are supposed to, but the core voltage no longer decreases when the frequency decreases, which defeats the purpose of EIST.
I would add that, if you have done a significant overclock, there is a chance that the maximum voltage you have chosen is one that will cause your CPU to degrade slowly over time. In that case, you certainly don't want to have the CPU operating at that voltage when you are doing nothing more demanding than typing comments on the Anandtech web site.
So it would be really nice to know if the problem I describe is specific to Asus or whether MSI has the same problem.