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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...

OCed 2D Results

First up some daily air overclocking results: instead of just increasing the CPU multiplier to 45X, we also set the CORSAIR Dominator Platinum RAMs at 2800MHz C11-13-13-31 2T and tighten the secondary and tertiary timings to put some extra load on the Integrated Memory Controller too. This tweaking takes some time and can vary depending on the motherboard, processor and memory being used.

i7-4770K@4500MHz 1.25Vcore

CORSAIR 2800C11-13-13-31 2T (tweaked from SPD C11-14-14-31)

Why only 4500MHz ? Well our retail CPU is not comparable with most of the Intel ES CPUs we saw popping up on many websites. Party fooling people 5GHz daily can be done at 1.3Vcore...great for who have these samples, but you the readers will be so utterly disappointed if your brand new CPU can't even reach a rock solid 4600MHz stable at 1.3Vcore. Maybe with one out of 100 retails you can manage the same speeds as the ES versions. Our i7-4770K retail is very average in daily OC and voltage (1.25Vcore), however just gets too hot at anything over 4600MHz when being used for a longer period. Delidding and re-applying the thermal paste would unleash a far higher OC potential for sure.

No surprise to see the Z97 XPOWER continuing the trend it set when being ran at the default CPU speed. The MSI bios is intuitive to use and the Memory Presets will help many users to dial in their favorite memory. Similar to the stock runs, the performance difference with the Z87 version is noticeable.

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