- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

MSI Z97 XPOWER AC Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2014-09-26

MSI continues to update their range of Overclocking motherboards with each new major chipset release. When Intel released their brand new socket 1150 Z97 chipset MSI was ready with another three motherboards targeted at the OC crowd. The affordable Z97 MPOWER exists in two versions: the Z97 MPOWER and the Z97 MPOWER MAX AC and the ultimate flagship of all LGA1150 motherboards must be the Z97 XPOWER AC. The latter being the one and only Z97 based motherboard supporting out of the box 4-way SLI GPU setups. The included accessories are too numerous to list, most interesting for overclockers will be the inclusion of the Delid guard and the OC Fan stand. Time to unravel MSI's latest OC addition...

Stock 2D Results

In our 2D test suite we can discover how well the BIOS team did their job in making this board compatible and efficient with our test hardware. Normally there's not much to explore when comparing motherboards of the same chipset. The CPU used here is still our loyal 4770K processor from the Z87 days, alike the Vengeance Pro 2400C10 Corsair memory kit.

Starting off as usual with the single threaded SuperPI 32M and the multi-threaded WPrime 1024 benchmark. Straight out of the box and by just loading the XMP memory profile we can see the Z97 XPOWER AC means serious business. The Z97 XPOWER is a totally different board than the Z87 variant; the latter was plagued by design flaws and an immature BIOS that made it perform not up the standards for a high end flagship model. The Z97 XPOWER seems to set things straight again for the MSI team.

The AIDA64 software seems to optimized for the MSI lineup or is it the other way around? In general MSI boards have got great performance out of the box thanks to the tight secondary and tertiary memory settings. When comparing the Z87 versus the Z97 model, we see straight that MSI has corrected the major flaws of the previous high end model. The Z97 XPOWER is positioned where it should be, at the top of the charts!

No matter what we threw at the XPOWER board, in 2D the Z97 XPOWER continues to play along with the big boys. All credit to the optimized BIOS, maximizing the memory bandwidth and thus enhancing the general performance of the motherboard.

No comments available.

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.