MSI Z87 MPOWER (Z87) Motherboard Review

Since MSI started dividing their products into ranges, we didn’t really see a great deal from the MPOWER brand until it was teamed up directly with the “Lightning Series” which opened up a huge pathway for outstanding products that sit at the top of the stack. The Z77 MPOWER showed that they could develop motherboards to match the performance of their VGA counterparts while offering up a funky yellow colour scheme that other brands may have been to scared to use, but that’s just my personal opinion, so don’t take it as gospel truth, as I’m just speculating on that one.

The Z87 chipset allows MSI to get a bit more creative and they have certainly done that with the Z87 MPOWER that we’ve looked at today. To start with, I want to talk a bit about the styling as this is a key area of this board and something that MSI have focused heavily on over the launch of their newest products, and a lot of it can be seen just from the PCB. As you could see from the pictures, especially when looking around the CPU socket, you’ll see that things have been cleaned up a lot and ditched a lot of the logos that you’d ordinarily see and moved them to the rear of the board as well as erasing the lines that generally show you where CPU coolers should be installed, as generally anyone buying a board of this magnitude is likely to know exactly where a CPU cooler gets mounted, I’m sure.

The rest of the styling is spot on, and has a kind-of Metro 2033 Last Light feel to it with the large black and yellow accented “M” shape cooler around the CPU. The other cooler which covers the Z87 chipset also does a nice job of complementing the rest of the board with its half “M” style branding. The memory slots and expansion bays could have been yellow to give more of a contrast feel to the board, but the black works well too and overall the MSI Z87 MPOWER really is a stunner.

In terms of features and functionality, the MPOWER definitely isn’t lacking in this department with multi-GPU support for both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, improved audio which can only be described as awesome and generally is something of a subjective feature, so if you get the chance, we invite you to try it out as it does make a difference over standard audio in gaming, movies and music, and the inclusion of the improved BIOS is a much-wanted add-on too.

Another key feature of this board is the overclocking capabilities which was probably the easiest Haswell result we’ve ever had with little to no changes needing to be done to hit 5GHz with a simple increase of the CPU ratio multiplier. OF course this CPU speed increase helped to push the performance up by quite large amounts across a variety of our benchmark tests. Speaking of performance, I have to admit that compared to the other Z87 boards we tested against, we were slightly disappointed as the Z87 MPOWER (being a high-end board) ended up mostly at the bottom of our charts, but this is something that can be rectified by a BIOS update, and we’re sure that with the right tweaking, this issue can be solved and the performance boosted quite dramatically.

The Z87 MPOWER seems to tick all of the right boxes for style, functionality and overclockability, and with a more mature BIOS, we should see this being a great all-rounder for those wanting high-end functionality from a reliable brand.

Pros

• Black PCB is stunning
  
• Overall design compliments the board really well
• Cooling around CPU socket is bold but understated
• SLI/CrossFire support
• Plenty of features for those wanting them
• Reliability and quality is strong from MSI
• Improved BIOS is welcomed
• Overclocking potential is huge

Cons

• Stock performance is down in comparison

eTeknix Says: If looking for a strong reliable board with quality components, the Z87 MPOWER offers just that with an easy-to-use BIOS that will see you pushing your hardware to the limits with ease while offering the latest features that the Z87 chipset has to offer, really harnessing its true potential for the end-user, a worthy board that could be suitable for all types of users.

MSI Z87 MPOWER (Z87) Motherboard Review

Thanks to MSI for providing this review sample.