MSI Z77 MPower (Z77) Motherboard Review

Taking the board out of the box, it’s easily noticeable how MSI have designed this board to pair up with their Lightning range of cards with the yellow stripes that run along all three heatsinks on the board. The coolers themselves even have a little bit of the Twin Frozr’s design about them, which again makes for a perfect match.

Moving a little closer to the CPU socket we can get a look at the power delivery that is on offer here. Using nothing but Military Class III components, MSI have fitted the board with an enhanced power system with hybrid digital power using the standard array of solid caps and solid ferrite chokes to give an ultra smooth power delivery to the chip when pushing those clocks to the super high levels.

Round behind the heatsinks we find the AUX 8-pin power adaptor which has been optimised for power delivery to K series CPU’s.

Looking a little closer at the chipset cooler we can get a better view on how the styling between this board and Lightning series boards  is closely resembled with the yellow stripe on top of the cut heatsink cover.

Moving back up to the top of the board, we find MSI’s typical line of power, reset and OC Genie buttons, V Check points and 24-pin power connector. As we know, when running multi GPU set-ups the board can aid from a little extra power and this time round rather than a molex or SATA power adaptor like we find on other vendors boards, MSI have chosen a 6-pin PCI-e power adaptor.

Memory support comes with capacity for up to 32GB of Dual-channel DDR3 memory with stock speeds ranging from 1600MHz right up to 3000MHz when given a heavy dose of overclocking.

Graphics support comes with the option for up to 3-way SLI or CrossFireX and MSI do recommend that a 3rd Gen Ivy Bridge chip is used to enable full functionality on the third lane. In between these three lanes we find four PCI-e x1 lanes. It may have been a welcome sight to see one or two more x16 lanes, but given the performance of recent GPUs, this may not be such an issue.

The bottom edge of the board plays host to a fairly standard array of front panel headers for audio, USB and fans. We can just see in the top right of the photo a switch which is used to change between the two BIOS that are found on board.

Up and round by the SATA ports, we find an angled native USB 3.0 header, which given the size of the plugs that go onto them, is a welcome sight. To the right of this we find a debug LED which when fully booted changes to give a readout of the CPU temperature. SATA support comes with six ports all run by the Z77 chipset, the right hand two ports run at SATA III speeds and the remaining four ports to the left run at SATA II speeds. All the ports support IRST and RAID 0/1/5/10.

Round on the back of the board, connectivity may look basic, but in fact there is more than enough for most user’s needs, with six USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, a PS/2 combo port, gigabit LAN, DisplayPort, HDMI, S/PDIF, 8-channel audio, Bluetooth and WiFi. Between the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports we can see a small clear CMOS button.

One thing we did note with the on-board WiFi is how far the unit protrudes out of the I/O panel (a good half inch) . Whilst this is not a problem once installed, we do recommend taking care when removing the board from its shipping box, as not to damage this when removing it for installation.