We’ve already had a taste of what ASUS and Gigabyte have to offer in the way of Z87 motherboards, and now it’s time to give MSI’s lineup a spin. MSI’s offering of Z87 motherboards has essentially three tiers: the “POWER” series (which includes four XPOWER and MPOWER boards), a trio of gaming boards, and five mainstream boards. The company sent us a motherboard from each area to put through their paces.
The Z87 chipset goes hand-in-hand with Intel’s 4th-generation Haswell processors, and we outfitted the three MSI boards--the tiny Z87I, the Z87-G45 Gamer, and the Z87 MPOWER Max overclocker--with an Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5 GHz) CPU to see how the trio performs.