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.
