Every manufacturer of computer components has a particular line of products that stand out above the rest for one reason or another. On the consumer level this is either because of their feature enriched boards that are designed to meet the demands of the everyday user, but more commonly we find boards that are geared towards the high end user such as the power hungry gamer or the overclockers. Overclockers as we know don’t care about how many USB ports a board has or how many different accessories come with the board. What they care about is how well the board clocks and what the manufacturer has done to make it stand out for this reason alone.
MSI have had a number of overclocking boards featured in the past and the Z77 MPower is one of the latest to come off the end of the production line. In essence it is dubbed to be the little brother of the XPower-II line of boards and because of this we see a few traits trickle down to also indicate that its being suited to be paired with their Lightning line of graphics cards.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG12GX1RUw8[/youtube]
Like a large number of other MSI products, there are a number of features that we find on the board that descend from other lines such as Military Class III components, OC Genie II and Click BIOS II which is becoming more familiar to us here at eTeknix. One notable point that we do note on the box this time round is the OC certification and this is important for MSI as they have claimed rights to having the world’s first OC certified motherboard. All is looking good for the MPower so far so let’s have a quick look at the box and what we get with the board, then have a closer look on what’s on offer.
Along with the usual array of manuals, product guides and driver discs, we get four SATA cables, a two-way SLI bridge, multimeter connectors for the voltage check points, and a pair of quick connectors for the front panel headers.
The other main item that we find in the box is an antenna for the motherboards on-board WiFi and an extender for those times when a better positioning of the aerial is required.
It’s a nice board, I like it but if I intended upgrading I’d rather wait a short time for the Z87 chipset and Hasslewell chips.