MSI Z87 Motherboard Roundup: Rockin Haswell

Name: MSI Z87 Motherboard Roundup: Z87I, Z87-G45 Gaming, and Z87 MPOWER Max
Brand: MSI

by Seth Colaner — Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 11:24 AM EDT

Test Setup and PCMark Tests

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective UEFI menus and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS/UEFI and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform. The drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Home Premium x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared temp and prefetch data, and ran the tests.

Our system included an Intel Core i7-4770K processor, ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285, 4GB of Kingston DDR3-1600MHz RAM, and an OCZ Vertex 4 SSD with Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64.

Futuremark PCMark 7

General Application and Multimedia Performance

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark whole-system benchmarking suite. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment and uses newer metrics to gauge relative performance. Below is what Futuremark says is incorporated into the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment, Creativity, and Productivity suites--the four modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for the system
Storage

Windows Defender

Importing pictures

Gaming

Video Playback and transcoding
Graphics

DirectX 9

Image manipulation
Web browsing and decrypting

The Entertainment test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in entertainment scenarios using mostly application workloads. Individual tests include recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and several gaming related workloads. If the target system is not capable of running DirectX 10 workloads then those tests are skipped. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given an Entertainment test score.

The Creativity test contains a collection of workloads to measure the system performance in typical creativity scenarios. Individual tests include viewing, editing, transcoding and storing photos and videos. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Creativity test score.

The Productivity test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in typical productivity scenarios. Individual workloads include loading web pages and using home office applications. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Productivity test score.

As expected, the scores here are tightly clustered, although the trio of MSI boards definitely posted some of the stronger numbers. Further, scores between the MSI boards were notably consistent.