MSI Z97 MPower Review

Overclocking and EFI

There's very little difference between the EFIs of MSI's premium motherboards and the Gaming and MPower brands just sport red and yellow colour details respectively. They're fairly simple compared to the likes of Asus's ROG, where you get the extras such as Secure Erase, but the MPower EFI is clean, uncluttered and also sports a useful fan control suite, overclocking profiles and EFI modification using favourites as well as realtime voltage displays. There are plenty of options to keep extreme overclockers happy.

In terms of overclocking things weren't quite as straightforward as we'd hoped, and the CPU needed 1.29V in the end to keep things stable at 4.8GHz using a 48x multiplier. As such, temperatures reported in Coretemp were amongst the highest of any Z97 board we've seen too, but it was stable nonetheless. It remains to be seen how the board holds up under more extreme conditions, but unfortunately we didn't have a container of LN2 to hand.