As someone who tries to make it out to as many LAN events as possible, small but powerful LAN rigs have been saving my back for years. Even though to some the LAN scene has been shrinking, the industry has really started to take notice of the small LAN rigs recently. We have seen smaller console like builds from boutique builders and Valves recent interest in steam boxes has gotten everyone in a frenzy as well. Because of that, I was happy to see MSI dive into the Mini ITX gaming market with their new GTX 760 Gaming ITX video card and the ZZ87I Gaming AC motherboard. Given our previous experience with similar products, MSI sent over the motherboard and video card combo to see what we thought about the two. Let’s see what they are all about.

Product Name: MSI Z87I Gaming AC and MSI GTX 760 Gaming ITX

Review Sample Provided by: MSI

Written by: Wes

Picture by: Wes

 

Z87I Gaming AC Specifications

CPU (Max Support)

i7

FSB / Hyper Transport Bus

100MHz

Chipset

Intel® Z87 Express Chipset

DDR3 Memory

DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1866*/2000*/2133*/2200*/2400*/2600*/2666*/2800*/3000*(*OC) MHz

Memory Channel

Dual

DIMM Slots

2

Max Memory (GB)

16

PCI-Ex16

1

PCI-E Gen

Gen3(16)

USB 3.0 ports (Front)

2

SATAIII

5

USB 2.0 ports (Front)

2

RAID

0/1/5/10

LAN

10/100/1000*1

TPM

1

USB 3.0 ports (Rear)

4

USB 2.0 ports (Rear)

2

Audio ports (Rear)

6

eSATA

1

Display Port

1

HDMI

1

DVI

1

VGA Max Share Memory (MB)

1760

DirectX

11

Form Factor

Mini-ITX

GTX 760 Mini-ITX Gaming

Graphics Engine

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760

Bus Standard

PCI Express x16 3.0

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Size(MB)

2048

Memory Interface

256 bits

Core Clock Speed(MHz)

1033 (Boost Clock: 1098) (OC mode)

1006 (Boost Clock: 1072) (Gaming mode)

980 (Boost Clock: 1033) (Silent mode)

Memory Clock Speed(MHz)

6008

DVI Output

Dual-link DVI-I x 1

HDMI-Output

1

Mini DisplayPort

2

HDMI Support

Y

Dual-link DVI

Y

Display Output (Max Resolution)

2560x1600

DirectX Version Support

11.2 API (feature level 11_0)

OpenGL Version Support

4.3

SLI Support

Y, 3-ways

Card Dimension(mm)

170 x 120 x 35 mm

Weight

580g

 

 


Packaging

Z87I Gaming AC

Other than it taking me a second to understand what the AC stood for in the name of the motherboard, there wasn’t anything that was a surprise on the packaging of the Z87I Gaming AC. Being part of MSIs gaming product line the Z87I has a silver dragon on the cover of the packaging as well as the black and red theme. On the flip side of the box you will find more information about the motherboard including a specification list and even a diagram of the rear I/O panel. MSI has also broken down the Audio Boost, Killer, NIC, and OC Genie features a little more to show off part of what makes the Z87I Gaming AC stand out.

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Inside, along with the motherboard itself you will get a nice pile of documentation and a few accessories as well. For documentation you get a user guide, a quick start guide, and software and driver discs. The two discs are labeled with Intel motherboard drivers and utilities and the second has LAN/Wif-Fi/Bluetooth Drivers and Utilities. It’s a little odd seeing two discs like this though. You also get a door hanger to hand on the door when you are gaming and a metal case badge as well. For accessories you have two SATA cables, your rear I/O panel, and the two wireless antennas for the Wireless AC adapter included on the board. I love that the rear I/O panel is blacked out other than the coloring around each connection, it’s a nice touch that will look good on most of today’s black cases.

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GTX 760 Mini-ITX Gaming

As expected, the GTX 760 Mini-ITX is no different than the Z87I Gaming AC when it came to packaging. You have the same red and black them that you find on all of MSIs gaming product line and the silver dragon across the cover. The only difference between the packaging this time around from what we normally see is the box is smaller than the other MSI video cards I have tested. This of course is because of the small size of the Mini-ITX Gaming version of the GTX 760. On the flip side of the box MSI has broken down a few of the cards features and even included an actual picture of the card itself. There is also a feature list with a very small specification list as well.

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Inside the box you will find the card wrapped up in a static protective bag and then sitting in a cutout in a layer of foam to keep the card safe. For accessories you get a DVI to VGA adapter, a mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, and a black and red six pin to 8 pin adapter cable. I love that MSI did make a point to color match the cable to their black and red theme although personally I wouldn’t want to run a 6 pin to 8 pin adapter like this, if they feel the card needs an 8 pin connection, I would prefer to not run that additional power through a 6 pin cable. But if you need something to hold you off until you get a new power supply, it’s great that it is included.

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Z87I Gaming AC Board Layout and Photos

There is something so simple yet awesome about Mini-ITX motherboards. I love that I can fit the entire board in a photo that on a typical board would just be a ¼ shot. There are a few really interesting things about the MSI Z87I Gaming AC. I will dig into the details over the next few photos, but I really wanted to point out the oddest thing about the board. If you look at the photo below, you will see that the rear I/o panel is on the left side, like it would normally be when you install a motherboard in a standard case. What is weird is that the chipset cooler, CPU, power, front I/O, and SATA connections are all out of place from where you would normally see them on a Mini ITX motherboard. Even more importantly, the chipset cooler is actually facing a different direction, making the MSI text sideways as well as the red dragon. It will really depend on the case you go with on if this will be an issue for you. In my Lunchbox’s 2 and 3 the board is placed like a standard motherboard. In that case I suspect that the top connections might be harder to get at.

image 5

Starting up in the top right behind the rear I/O panel you have the 8-pin CPU power connection. Above that MSI packed in the front panel audio header as well as a USB 2.0 header. Packed around the chipset cooler are five SATA 3 headers that all run on the Z87 chipset. Next you have a USB 3.0 header and then the 24 pin power connection. Just above the CPU socket you have two four pin PWM fan headers, one for the CPU and the other for a system fan.

image 6

Over on the right side of the top of the Z87I Gaming AC we have the dual band Intel Wireless AC adapter. The adapter hooks up to a Mini PCI Express connection so if for some reason you didn’t need the wireless you could swap it out for something else. But I know I plan on taking advantage of the wireless AC. On the far right you have two black DDR3 DIMM slots giving you a capacity of up to 16 gigs of ram.

image 7

Down on the bottom of the Z87I Gaming AC you really only have a couple things. First you have a PCI Express x16 slot that is perfect for running your high end video cards, I will show off the GTX 760 that MSI designed to work with this board in the next section. On the left side of the PCI Express slot you have the Boost Audio sound card. Up above the PCI Express slot and below the CPU socket is what MSI is calling the USB Audio Power. The idea behind this is to make sure that every single USB port does not drop below the 5v signal to make sure that USB audio cards get the power needed to perform well.

image 8

On the rear I/O of the Z87I Gaming AC you have a wide selection of connections. Starting over on the left you have two USB 2.0 ports for your mouse and keyboard as well as a legacy PS/2 connection for those who are running IBM Model M’s. For video connections using your Haswell CPUs onboard video you have a DVI connection as well as HDMI and DisplayPort. Above the DVI connection are the two antenna connections for the wireless AC card that is included with the board as well as the reason for the AC in the board’s name. Next you have an eSATA connection as well as four USB 3.0 plugs. The USB 3.0 plugs are blue in color to be easier to spot next to the USB 2.0 ports. The Killer NIC is also red in color and above the second row of USB 3.0 ports. Lastly you have a standard set of audio connection to go with the optical plug over on the left side of the I/O.

image 9

image 10

Being a Mini-ITX motherboard does mean there is a lot less for cooling. We have already seen the red and black dragon on the chipset, but if you look close you will also find another dragon. This one is actually next to the CPU socket on the power circuitry, from most views it just looks like a normal heatsink but the side profile shows off the hidden dragon. We saw this same heatsink on the other Gaming product line motherboards from MSI. It’s a nice touch, especially for anyone who really likes dragons.

image 11

The back of the Z87I Gaming AC is fairly uneventful. We have a better view of the black PCB, but beyond that you will find some of the required logos, I suspect that they put them here due to the board’s small size but I did see this same idea on the MPower board. On the MPower they did this to give the board a clean look.

image 12

 


GTX 760 Gaming ITX Card Layout and Photos

As I mentioned before when MSI showed off pictures of the GTX 760 Gaming ITX I was really excited to see they were entering the small form factor gaming scene. Frankly other than a couple low end cards that underperform, Asus’s DirectCU Mini cards are the only cards in this market. Even with my excitement, I did have a few concerns with the Gaming ITX, specifically it looks a LOT like the Asus card. Although I was very excited to see them get into the market, I would have preferred the card step out on its own rather than follow in their footsteps, both for variety and also to see what MSI would do. Even so, the design isn’t completely the same, so let’s take a close look into the details.

First things first, the fan shroud is a little different than what I have seen from the TwinFrozr designs. Not just because it has a single fan, that is expected at this size, but also because of its boxy shape. That is part of the reason it looks so similar to the Asus card. But MSI did change things up slightly with the contrast in glossy and flat finishes as well as the three red stripes that angle across the card. On the left side they included a dragon on the shroud. I’m a big fan of how they made the dragon glossy on top of the flat black finish. This keeps the dragon theme that MSI is known for in their gaming line while not being to obnoxious with it.

Under the fan shroud with the cooling design I saw more similarities with the competition. The heatsink design looks to be a spot on match nearly with the exception of the fan design. The fan on this card is very unique and I didn’t even catch it at first. The fan is designed to push air down over the heatsink while also pushing air out through the heatsink around it. This is a combination of the fan style you would see on a reference card with an aftermarket fan design. They did this by putting fins on the outside of the fan where you can’t see them. All of this is important because when you are working with such a small space you have to get as much performance out of the space you have. MSI certainly used every inch of space they could to keep the GTX 760 cool.

image 17

image 19

image 22

Although a small card like this is designed for a Mini-ITX build, you do still have two SLI bridge connections to be able to run up to triple SLI if you would like too.

image 20

For power MSI went with an 8-pin power connection to save space over the two 6-pin connections that the reference GTX 760 went with. This is the same thing that Asus went with and it’s not a shock because it does save a little space on a very cramped PCB.

image 21

For display connections MSI changed things up slightly over what I have been seeing on most other cards recently. Typically I see a double DVI ports, one HDMI, and a full sized DisplayPort. For the GTX 760 Gaming ITX MSI went with a single DVI port, one HDMI port, and two mini DisplayPorts. I would prefer to see two DVI connections generally though.

image 24

The area the stand out the most when compared to the Asus card is the back of the MSI. Sure you can see here that the GTX 760 Gaming ITX does have the same taller PCB. But MSI did step things up here with a backplate covering most of the back of the card. Even though the card is short and won’t need the support when installed I do still think it is a good idea. In this case, when you are building small rigs wiring can get extremely tight. With a backplate you don’t have to worry as much about a wire rubbing on the back of your video card and shorting out.

image 18

 


Performance

Then it came time to test out the performance of the Z87I Gaming AC and GTX 760 Gaming ITX I wasn’t really sure the best way to approach testing them together. Doing all of our motherboard and video card testing would just be overloading. What I decided to do was run the combination together through the same benchmarks that I ran our LunchBox 3 build to show how they perform together and then run the video card itself through our standard benchmarks to best compare it to the competition from Asus.

So to start things off, here are the results from the 3DMark Fire Strike, PCMark 8, Passmark, heaven benchmark 4.0, and wPrime benchmarks. To see how they compared to the Lunchbox build that was using the same model CPU and RAM and a similar SSD view the results HERE. As for the results, once again I was very impressed with what a small form factor system can do when companies like MSI give us the high end parts we need. All of my benchmarks came in extremely close to the Lunchbox 3 build, proving that the MSI board and video card would be just as good of a combo to run in your Mini-ITX LAN rig.

fire strike

fire strike extreme

pcmark8

heavenbechmark

passmark

wprime

Moving on to the performance of the GTX 760 Gaming ITX I want to talk a little more about a few specific benchmarks and then I will just include the rest of the performance benchmarks below. You see, the performance between the GTX 760 and the GTX 670 is marginal at best. Because of that I wanted to take a look at the cooling performance and power usage of both cards to see how they compare. Not only that, cooling and power usage are very important when it comes to LAN rigs.

Starting with power usage, you can see that both the GTX 760 Gaming ITX and the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini use a similar amount of power at idle. When put under load the numbers are close as well, but the MSI card does perform better with 8 watts less usage. For those of you trying to figure out what power supply to use in your SFF build its important to remember when looking at these numbers that the testing was done on a larger 6 core monster of a PC. My experience with these cards using i7-4770’s has been that a 450 watt PSU is actually more than enough with a buffer. That means you can run the small Silverstone power supply if you would like to save space.

graph17

Noise performance was once again very close. The MSI card is actually noisier at idle but a few decibels less when put at 100% fan speed. Typically I would say that 100% fan speed never gets used, but in a small form factor build cards can sometimes reach those temperatures so it can be important.

graph18

The last cooling benchmark of course would be the temperatures under load benchmark. I reached these numbers on an open air test bench using the Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 to heat the card up. With similar cooling designs I was expecting similar numbers and for the most part that was correct. The MSI card settled at 80 degrees under load while the Asus card performed slightly better with 77 degrees under the same load. Both cards are warmer than the average aftermarket card, but if you keep in mind the small size that they had to fit in the cooling they both did very well. In fact they both still outperformed their respective reference cards with less space, although the MSI was cutting it close with one degree.

graph19

How does the GTX 760 Gaming ITX compare to the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini for performance? Well I think the best way to compare the two would be to look at the latest 3DMark Fire Strike results. As you can see below the GTX 670 does pull slightly ahead in the standard Fire Strike benchmark due to its higher CUDA core count (1152 vs 1344) but overall the numbers are actually very close. In the Extreme benchmark the additional base clock speed that the GTX 760 provides helped the Gaming ITX pull ahead. I think in the end, you aren’t going to see a big difference in gameplay so the price point will play a big role, but I will get into that more in the overall section.

graph3

graph4

Here are the rest of the benchmarks, sorry for the graph overload.

Synthetic Benchmarks

graph1

graph2

graph11

In Game Benchmarks

graph16

graph15

graph14

graph13

graph12

graph10

graph9

graph8

graph7

graph6

graph5

 


Overall and Final Verdict

I am extremely excited that MSI has turned their focus onto the Mini ITX and small form factor gaming market. I have been using small LAN rigs for years now and let’s be honest, it has been very hard to find parts. Once you do find good parts their isn’t much of a variety so a lot of the builds look very similar. Now with the Z87I Gaming AC and the GTX 760 Gaming ITX there are more options on the market.

image 23

Well are they good options? After spending time with them both I can say without a doubt they are both great options for your new LAN build. I do have a few issues with each part that I would like to point out though. First the colors between the motherboard and video card don’t match. Although I like the creativeness of the dragon design on the Z87I Gaming AC, I would prefer to see a design closer to the Mpower boards design but with red accents to still give it the Gaming theme. If they did that the Mini-ITX video card would properly match the motherboard. My other complaint about the Z87I Gaming AC was with their choice of network card. Although I didn’t experience any specific issues while testing, I have had multiple issues with them in the past. They tend to be a little picky and sometimes cause hard to replicate issues. I would have preferred to of seen an Intel NIC. Not only would it be a quality NIC from a manufacture people know, but it would also most likely save a little money as well.

The Z87 Gaming AC does have a lot going for it as well. First, MSI bundled in a wireless AC adapter so you won’t have to worry about slow network speeds or your PC not keeping up with wireless technology for a long time. Along with that MSI really packed in a lot into such a small form factor. You have more than enough USB ports on the rear with headers inside as well, five internal SATA connections, and the PCI Express x16 port. All together the board will be a perfect LAN rig or even a SteamBox.

The GTX 760 Gaming ITX is also a great fit with the SteamBox idea. Together you can build a high powered rig that would be just as at home under your TV as it would be on your desk (or at a LAN for that matter). The only downsides to the card to me at the similarities to Asus’s Mini ITX design. I would have preferred they do something that is more MSI with a single fan Twin Frozr cooler for example. The fan they used was very interesting though with the dual direction fan blades. MSI also stepped up and included a backplate with the GTX 760 Gaming ITX, this adds value, styling, and protects the card as well. The only other thing I would want to change would be adding a second DVI connection back. I understand they removed it to give more airflow but personally I would prefer to have a second DVI than both of the DisplayPort connections.

For pricing both the motherboard and the video card come in at prices that are competitive with similar products. The GTX 760 Gaming ITX is actually the only Mini ITX focused video card available currently, so it will be interesting to see later on if its price stays competitive with the GTX 760 model from Asus. It does MSRP for less than the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini did when I covered it earlier this year. All said, if you want to build a rig with these components and an i7-4770 you are still looking at a little over a thousand dollars. That is a fairly hefty buy in price if you are thinking of a steam box, but the performance you get really does make up for the price. Not to mention nothing else is going to let you build a smaller more powerful rig!

fv3z87Igamingacrecomended

fv3gtx760itxrecomended

 

Author Bio
garfi3ld
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.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33770 24 Jan 2014 16:35
For those of you who are into small form factor gaming, MSI has a new motherboard and video card that you might be interested in. Check it out!
Plague's Avatar
Plague replied the topic: #33772 24 Jan 2014 20:44
Nice stuff, motherboard is an upgrade to the one I have only intel. Video seem to be just a bit slower then the Asus card, which I find odd, but not bad either way. To bad these were not out last September. hehe

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