MSI Z97I Gaming ACK Review

Test Setup

With the exception of ATTO, which we use to measure the performance of a motherboard's SATA controllers, all of our benchmarks use real applications that give you a great idea of how well a product fares when performing the tasks for which you're likely to use it.

We test with our own Media Benchmarks suite, which uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-Zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we benchmark the board running The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Total War: Shogun 2's DX9 CPU test and record the minimum and average frame rates.


Our benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase. We ran the memory at 1,600MHz so our results would be comparable to previous results in many of our benchmarks for CPUs that we're no longer able to test. We've also included numbers for the fastest Z87 motherboard in each set of results for comparison, rather than clutter the graph with older models.

Common Components:

• Intel Core i7-4770K
  
• 16GB Corsair Vengreance Pro DDR3 1,866MHz (at 1,600MHz)
  
• Plextor PX-G256M6e SSD
  
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB
  
• Corsair Pro Series Gold HX750 power supply
  
• OCZ Vector 150 240GB SSD
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit