BIOS
MSI’s UEFI BIOS, dubbed Click BIOS 4, isn’t the most attractive out there. Unlike ASUS and Gigabyte who both offer full HD 1920 x 1080 BIOSes the MSI Click BIOS 4 sports a puny 1024 x 768 resolution. However, visuals aside it still retains all the core fundamentals of a BIOS. The Click BIOS 4 is divided into six main tabs: settings; OC, M-Flash, OC Profile, Hardware Monitor and Board Explorer. You can also see MSI’s OC Genie “button” at the top left which when clicked on starts auto-overclocking your system.
Within settings you find a system status tab, a boot tab, a security tab, an exit menu tab and an advanced settings tab which is further divided into 10 more tabs.
The OC Tab has all the settings for overclocking your CPU and RAM as well as enabling things like Turbo mode.
If you need to update your MSI Z87I Gaming AC BIOS then you can do so from the M-Flash tab. It’s easy – download the BIOS file to a USB stick, load it up into the UEFI and flash the BIOS within the UEFI.
On the right hand side we start with the OC Profile tab where you can save and create overclocking profiles.
Inside the Hardware Monitor tab you can modify fan curves and temperature targets or just fix fan speeds to a desired level.
The board explorer tab allows you to see what you have plugged in to each of the main connectivity areas of the motherboard.
I recently cobbled a mini ITX system together for myself with spare parts I had lying about some of which included a Bitfenix Prodigy case, a MSI R9 290 GFX, i5 4670K CPU and an Asus Z87 Gryphon mobo, a reasonably decent gaming build you’ll agree. While everything worked fine (it was a pain in the ass to hide the full length PSU cables) it all ran far too hot for my liking especially the GFX which reached a toasty and cacophonous 92 deg under testing. Needless to say I disassembled it, packed everything away in their boxes again and returned to my tried and tested ATX system. Mini ITX makes sense in a lot of ways especially in the HTPC arena but it’s not everybody’s cuppa tea and definitely not mine, I’m a gamer at heart.
That’s more to do with the R9 290 being a hot card tbh… if you used GTX 780 you’;d get much better temps I think 😛
It is a very hot running card at the best of times made even worse in small enclosures, add that to the fact that my sample used a reference cooler. On an open test bench I recorded temps of ~ 83 deg. The temps could probably be improved a bit with a quality and correctly applied TIM. Don’t get me wrong, I like the mini ITX form factor but they have their limitations.
BTW. I liked the review. Thanks.
I agree the form factor is limited but what you can do with the form factor seems to be improving significantly every year…it wasn’t THAT long ago that we could only get Atom CPUs in the ITX form factor and the only cases that were available were hideous enterprise-style boxes. I think anyone building an ITX system from scratch (and out of their own money 😉 ) is likely to use an Nvidia card GTX 750Ti-GTX 780Ti depending on budget. And thanks, glad you liked it.
I run an i7-4770K, with the MSI Gaming AC Mini itx board and a EVGA GTX 760 w/ACX in a bitfenix. My temps are perfectly fine. I think its the R9 290. I’ve heard they run really hot
Amazing really, especially when you will learn it still has a fully fetched PCIe x16 slot, KillerNIC Gigabit Ethernet, WIFI, USB 3.0 and heck even four SATA 6 Gbps ports. To make things even tastier we pair it with a GeForce GTX 760 GAMING ITX graphics card, and the combo… well it’s just awesome. http://num.to/457-287-619-226