Our first look at a non-Intel Z87 motherboard today is the Z87-G45 Gaming from the folks over at MSI. With a gaming focus I am really excited to see what the board is all about. At a quick glance at both the packaging and the board itself it’s clear that MSI is going with the dragon theme that we saw on a few of their notebooks this year at CES. I’m curious if the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming will be on fire, or just fizzle out. Let’s take a closer look and find out!

Product Name: MSI Z87-G45 Gaming

Review Sample Provided by: MSI

Written By: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

The packaging for the Z87-G45 Gaming is a perfect representation of what is coming inside of the box. Not only does it have a large dragon on front but they also have the black and red theme going. They have proudly put their Gaming Series badge right up front as well. Up top you have the Intel and Killer logos sitting next to the logo/recommendation from FNATIC, the pro gaming team. Around back I was really hoping to see a full photo of the board but even without that MSI did pack in a lot of good information about their audio boost, Killer NIC, OC Genie, and all of the other key features of the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming. They also included a line drawing of the rear I/O panel  along with a short specifications listing to help people understand what they are buying and to be sure it has all of the connections that they will need now and in the future.

Inside the box you get a user guide and a quick installation guide for documentation. You of course get a driver disc although I expect it will look different than what we got in (our sample wasn’t a production sample). You also get a nice metal MSI gaming series badge. It’s a little large to use as a case badge in most cases but I can see some case modders putting it to use in their builds. You also get a door hanger that says I’m sorry busy gaming on it, something I should consider putting to use here in the office I think.

You also get two right angled SATA cables, this number is a little low as most boards come with 3-4 but it should be enough for most people to get their rig put together. You also get a rear I/O panel as well. The I/O panel looks almost completely blacked out at first but if you look close you can see that everything is labeled in a dark red. To some this might make things a little hard to install but being a board made for gamers most should know how to plug in their PC. The dark look is going to look awesome in the back of someone’s computer, a nice touch.

Board Layout and Pictures

The MSI Z87-G45 Gaming has an attractive red and black theme going on that I feel is going to look good in just about any build, there isn’t anything over the top that is going to spoil a clean build. Let’s take a closer look around the board section by section and see what MSI has packed into this motherboard.

Starting up in the top left corner behind the rear I/O panel our 8 pin CPU power connection is tucked up next to the board’s heatsinks. I would rather see this connection be a little closer to the edge of the board for easier access as well as cleaner wire management.

On the top right corner of the Z87-G45 Gaming we have the four black DDR3 DIMM slots. Just above them there are two four pin PWM fan connections for CPU cooler use as well as a single system fan PWM header over on the right edge of the motherboard. The 24 pin power connection is also right next to the DIMM slots as well as a small voltage check point area.

For SATA connections we have six SATA 3 connections that are all run on the Z87 controller. MSI has put a note warning that if you do use the boards mSATA port that port 6 will be disabled. Next to the SATA connections we also have the internal USB 3.0 header has a nice right angle connection that should make keeping your wire management top not when building your PC, I hope we see more boards with right angle USB 3.0 ports in the future.

Down in the bottom right corner below the chipset cooler there are three USB 2.0 internal headers for your case’s front panel USB ports. Next to the USB ports is the front panel header that is split into two headers. It isn’t color coded so you will have to give it a close look to read the connection labels that are printed on the PCB just below it. All the way on the left of the image there is another four pin PWM fan header for system/case fan use.

I mentioned the fan connection on the last image, but also un under the lowest PCI Express slot is the onboard audio front panel connection.

The area in between the PCIe slots and the left side of the board is taken up with the boards onboard audio. MSI seems to of covered up the onboard’s audio amp with a small cover with their Audio Boost branding that will also light up and glow when the board is powered up.

For PCI slots we have four PCI Express x1 slots that are placed in a way to space our the X16 slots by an extra slot to give the top video card when running SLI or Crossfire more air to help it stay cool. As fas as the three PCI Express x16 slots they are all PCI Express 3.0. The top slot will run ini x16 if you are only running one card and if you add a second card both top and middle slots will run in x8. The third slot looks like a x16 slot but electronically it is a x4 slot meaning it has less bandwidth but is still good for hooking up any sound cards or capture devices you might need.  

Tucked in up under the CPU socket and next to the top PCI Express x1 slot MSI has also included an mSATA connection. If you are limited for room in your case this is a great option for connecting an SSD right onto the board.

The rear I/O panel is packed completely full of connections. On the left we have a legacy PS2 port and two USB 2.0 plugs for your mouse and keyboard. For onboard video connections, we have VGA, DVI and HDMI connections, a lot more than the single HDMI port that we saw on the Intel board. There are four USB 3.0 ports, it’s obvious that getting all of the video connections did cut slightly into the quantity of USB 3.0 ports we had available. For Ethernet the Z87-G45 Gaming is powered by a Killer NIC and is also red to match the rest of the board. Lastly we have all of the standard audio connections including both coaxial and optical S/PDIF connections.

When you flip the Z87-G45 Gaming over you have full view of the black PCB that helps give the board its classic styling. There isn’t much else to look at on the backside. The only bracket is the LGA1150 socket backplate. The boards other heatsinks didn’t require any special brackets.

Cooling

I mentioned the dragon styling in the opening of this room, it didn’t take look after I got the Z87-G45 Gaming out of the box before I started to find even more. It’s almost like thinking your friend is a fan of a TV show but when you go to their house the walls are covered in posters from the show. The chipset cooler over to the right of the PCI slots is the most obvious dragon. I love that they used two different anodized pieces of aluminum to give it the red and black look. This is much better than just going with a badge or a sticker.

It wasn’t until I was looking closely at the rest of the cooling that I spotted it. MSI actually shaped both of the other heatsinks out of dragons. You can’t see it at all from the top but when you look from the side angle it’s very clear. This was an interesting detail that really completed the dragon them. I love that they used two different pieces of aluminum on these as well to give the board the red and black theme. Considering some of the voltage control has moved to the CPU itself, these heatsinks should be more than enough to keep everything cool, if not overkill even.

UEFI and Software

MSI bundles their new Command Center software with the Z87-G45 Gaming. I was very happy to see that MSI has been working on creating a central piece of software for motherboards similar to what they have been doing with Afterburner with video cards. In the past their software was fragmented and hard to use, Command Center helps improve that.  The software does allow you detail control of your cooling and overclocking. They have also built in RAMDisk into the software itself as well. This is especially interesting because typical RAMDdisk software isn’t cheap if you want anything more than a 4Gb RAMDisk size, MSI promises unlimited capacity.

We are still able to dig in and check out the Z87-G45 Gaming’s UEFI though. MSI calls it click BIOS 4 but it is UEFI bios with full mouse control. To show you all of the features I have a basic walkthrough video that shows all of its features below. I love the top bar that gives you the time and temperatures right up top for you to see while you are adjusting settings. The three options on the left stay open all of the time but the right side of the screen sometimes has three options but when you are adjusting settings the right side shows a short explanation of each option to help you understand what you are looking at.

The UEFI overall worked well with my mouse but if you watch the video you will see that I did have a problem when I get more than one option deep into settings, clicking the back button would take me all the way back to the home page, it was a little frustrating. The other issue I ran into is how the bios reacts to scroll wheel use. As it should, when you scroll it arrows down through the options listed on your screen at the time. My problem was if you move the mouse over those same options while scrolling it stops everything you are doing because mousing over an option overrides whatever location you are currently on. Considering how much room the BIOS options take up, this made scrolling to find the option I need a little difficult. Beyond those two issues though the bios was filled with interesting features like the board diagram that will even show you what hard drives you have plugged into what SATA port visually. I think MSI still needs to tweak the UEFI to make it a little smoother to use, but they have a good UEFI as a base to work from.

Our Test Rig

Our Testing Procedures

Performance

As a whole we are changing the way we look at our motherboard testing slightly. The truth is a lot of the standard benchmarks you see in our reviews as well as others aren’t really needed. These tests actually test components like the CPU and video card more than anything else. Because of that we have trimmed down our testing slightly to make it easier for you to take in. We still do some testing though to make sure none of the boards that we test have any glaring issues but overall you should only see a slight variation in numbers. That variation isn’t a big deal; it is only the big variances that we are looking for. Having cleared that up, I would also like to point out that testing like our Audio and storage testing still are important as they are sub systems that the motherboard manufactures have control over, be sure to check out those sections as well.

Once you get over the fact that our table currently looks like a Cincinnati Bengals ad you can see that the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming doesn’t have anything that is noticeably off in its performance. Once we have more motherboard results to compare it to you will be able to see that more (we are publishing another review after this one today, if you are interested check the results on that one to compare).

USB 3.0 and SATA 3

I put the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming to the test with our USB 3.0 and SATA tests to compare how well the USB 3.0 performance is compared to the faster SATA interface. Here you can see that although the USB 3.0 interface is fast there is a limit to what it is capable. I was really hoping that MSI would have software that boosts this performance up like we have seen from Asus in the past and frankly they might have that in their software when we finally get our hands on it. Until then you will be stuck with fast USB 3.0 read speeds, not blazing fast like I would like to see.

Audio

Again the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming does get first child treatment where we don’t really have any numbers to compare it against. I will say that although the audio on the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming wasn’t mind blowing. It was more than enough for most people. The built in headphone amp did a good job of pushing the audio loudly into my headphones when testing it. This being a mid-range board I wasn’t expecting anything more than this really.

Overall and Final Verdict

The MSI Z87-G45 Gaming is an interesting motherboard. Typically when a company markets a gaming board they are top of the line. The MSI Z87-G45 Gaming take a different approach by going for a mid-range price. This is obviously nicer on your wallet while still giving some of the features that people expect to see in their gaming boards. For me, what I found the most interesting is the overall styling they went with. The dark red and black theme isn’t something we see too much (ROG boards are a lot brighter) and it really looks good, I know a few people with a dark red themed builds that will most likely be considering this board for that reason alone. Not only that but their dedication to using dragons that extends all the way into shaping the heatsinks into dragons is really interesting while still being subtle enough that a lot of people won’t even see it unless it is pointed out to them.

MSI did a good job of adding features to the Z87-G45 on top of styling. For example, they included a headphone amp in the onboard audio. While the onboard audio wasn’t as high end as we have seen on other motherboards recently, it’s also not priced like those boards. So seeing a headphone amp was a nice thumbs up to the gaming users that the board is designed for, gamers tend to use headsets a lot and this will help them hear in game details. Of course there was one feature they included specifically for gamers that I wasn’t all that big a fan of. The Killer network card didn’t give me any issues in my testing of this board but my past experiences with their network cards has given me reason to avoid them when I can, even though they do help with pings when you are downloading. In the included software MSI also bundled in a free copy of RAMDisk, a nice value adding feature that should give people even more reason to stock up on ram.

As a whole the MSI Z87-G45 Gaming is a great board for anyone interested in upgrading to Haswell. There are a few things I hope MSI can improve on but most of those could even be fixed with firmware or software adjustments later on. It will be interesting to see how it holds up once I get a chance to take a look at other Z87 motherboards this week including another more premium board from MSI.

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.