MSI Z77 MPower (Z77) Motherboard Review

Based solely on the MPower’s features, I wouldn’t say that this is a top end board, but we can’t always judge a book by its cover and there is always two sides to every story. Whilst this is not a feature rich board, with every option under the sun spewing out – like we often see on the high end boards, it does have the performance that is worth talking about.

For what is a mid-range board, we’ve seen some very strong results mixed in with a couple that do drop a little behind in comparison to the rest of the competition. The only test that I did find a little surprising was PCMark7 – given the results that we found on the gaming benchmarks, it was a little strange to find that on a system wide test, it did then fall towards the bottom of the results table, but the only reason we can see for this is due to the slightly lower results on the memory and storage benchmarks when looking at the bigger picture – either way I wouldn’t be too sad with the result that was achieved.

Overclocking is where this board is at though and on that front it was relatively easy to work with and there were no problems this time round, which is a welcome sign showing that the latest Click BIOS II is far more stable than its previous versions. Noting again that this is the world’s first OC certified board, I’m sure we’ll see a record attempt or two being made with this at the helm.

Design wise, if we go back to my review on Avexir’s MPower series memory from earlier this week, we can see where my statement on manufacturer’s styling all their products together comes into play. Taking this board and topping it off with an MSI GTX 680 Lightning graphics card and the aforementioned Avexir memory certainly makes for an excellent starting block for any system build and this combination would certainly make the choice of colour scheme very easy indeed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhg4fgGboFk[/youtube]

Based on the performance that is on offer by the Z77 MPower and given that it has a relatively low price of around £150, there is no question in my mind that this board is worthy of our Bang for Buck award. There are other options out there that cost a lot more, and whilst they offer a few more features, in some cases the performance is generally not as good as what we’ve seen today for the price.

Bottom line, if you’re after a great starting block to a medium budget build that can still give a lot of poke or you’re after a board to theme your system with, MSI’s Z77 MPower really ticks all the boxes in my books.