MSI Z87 MPOWER (Z87) Motherboard Review

In true MPOWER styling, we see an ATX form factor black PCB board with a very subtle yellow theme. One thing that is worth noticing that MSI have simplified their PCB dramatically, with a lot of logos now on the back of the board and the vanishing of a lot of lines which we’d expect to see, mainly around the CPU socket. The yellow on the board is subtle and should blend in well with some yellow fans, Lightning VGA card, Avexir MPOWER memory and possibly some yellow watercooling fluid.

This colour scheme is subtly positioned around the large heatsink that cools the Phases and is designed in such a way that it looks like a giant “M”. As stated, around the CPU socket, things look very clean due to the PCB and the styling that MSI have opted to go with.

Powering the CPU, we find two 8-pin ATX power connectors giving us high hopes for overclocking potential on this board, but we will have to wait until further on in the review to see how far things can be pushed by overclocking.

The colour scheme continues on the chipset cooler, with a large MSI branded cooler, featuring a yellow “half M”.

Moving up the board we find four DIMM slots operating in dual-channel mode. Support is for 32GB of DDR3 memory modules operating speeds ranging from 1066MHz all the way up to 3000MHz and has support for Intel Extreme Memory Profile modules. Just around the same area we find a multi BIOS switch, debug LED, voltage check points and some fan headers. We also find the typical ATX 24-pin power connector providing relevant juice to the rest of the board.

You can see that we have a nice setup with the expansion slots, with four PCI-Express x1 slots, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots and a Mini PCI-Express/mSATA 6Gb/s connector. The board supports 3-way AMD CrossFire technology and 2-way Nvidia SLI and the x16 lanes run at x8/x8/x0 or x8/x4/x4 if wanting to populate all slots.

The mSATA 6Gb/s port is situated between the first two x16 lanes and supports Intel Smart Response Technology AKA SSD Caching.

Moving down to the bottom of the board  we find a bucket load of buttons and headers including a front audio header, USB 2.0 connectors, fan header and the usual front panel LEDs and button headers. In terms of overclocking features, we find a power button, reset, base clock control buttons, OC Genie and OC Genie mode switch.

The board includes improved audio, known as audio boost which simply enhances the sound output by 30% due to an optimised AMP design and gold jack connectors which we will take a look at on the rear I/O. This enhances audio in music, movies and games, providing excellent audio to all consumers for all uses.

Moving to the opposite side of the board we find a USB 3.0 header next to a stack of SATA ports. In total there are 8 SATA ports of which six (SATA1-6) utilise the Intel Z87 chipset and the other two (SATA7-8) the ASMedia ASM1061 chipset. The Intel enabled ports have support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 and all 8 ports are SATA 6Gb/s.

Finishing off our look at the board, we find ourselves at the rear I/O where you can see two USB 2.0 ports, a PS2 keyboard/mouse combo port, a clear CMOS button, four USB 3.0 (ASMedia ASM1074 chipset), a Killer E2205 Gigabit LAN port, optical SPDIF (Realtek ALC1150), DisplayPort, two HDMI and two USB 3.0 ports powered through the Intel Z87 chipset. We also have six audio jacks with gold connectors which use 7.1 channel high-definition audio using the Realtek ALC1150 codec with the assistance of the audio boost technology that we mentioned earlier.