MSI Z77 MPower Review: The XPower’s Little Brother
by Ian Cutress on January 26, 2013 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- Z77
- Overclocking
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the 1250W Gold Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Test Setup
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
Interestingly one of the best points about the Z77 MPower is the power consumption. It takes the top spot in all our loading tests, showing that OC oriented boards (like the MSI and ASRock Z77 OC Formula) are actually rather power efficient.
Windows 7 POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
While nothing improved for the boot time when we selected Fast Boot options, the Z77 MPower misses out on our artificial ‘12 second is a good POST time’ mark by under a second.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
14 Comments
View All Comments
sherlockwing - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
I really love the 90 degree USB3.0 port on this board, it makes hiding the large and bulky 3.0 connector so much easier.This was one of board I considered before I bought my UP5-TH. Unforunately this board like most MSI boards use analog VRMs and MSI Bios don't allow Offset Overclocking so I went with the UP5-TH instead.
Blibbax - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
What exactly does this board need to be a top-notch overclocking board?IanCutress - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
A revised BIOS layout for options, a fully working software package that allows overclocking without issues in the OS (for digital power delivery options as well), and a series of automatic overclocking options for users that are unsure about overclocking but want more than the 4.2 GHz that OC Genie provides. There are a couple of boards in the $240-$280 range that adjust the VRM heatsinks to allow water cooling as well. Extreme overclockers would perhaps enjoy switches to disable PCIe slots, a wider variety of temperature probes on board, onboard on-the-fly adjustment buttons and a super level of BIOS options for skew, slew et al.Ian
NitroWare - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
The Intel ME is no longer solely ganged to the primary firmware and has not been for a while.Intel's package allows the ME to be invidually flashed or recovered using a number of bundled tools from DOS or Windows . Grab the ME pack either from the board OEM,Intel or station-drivers if you want to use the bleeding edge build#
If you are lazy, you can use asus's updater as it has been QA'd for end users IntelME81_Updating_Tool_V10001.zip from any ASUS Z77 download page, which is just Intel's flash tool and binary bundled with a custom ASUS front end which doesnt really work too well especially if you need to downgrade or reflash - they forgot the decision trees in the front end, but Intel's tool works well.
This will either contain a installshield or loose files
The Intel tools you are looking for are in neatly organised folders. MEtool.exe and FWUpdLcl64.exe, found in a variety of packages especially the ASUS package
both have context senstive help to dump version#s, recover, or force/flash the ME.
There are 2 sizes of ME for v8, 1.5MB and 5MB. Consumer Z77 use 1.5MB, I dunno what the 5MB one is for, maybe vPro systems
I cannot see any OEM custom builds as the binary comes from Intel, but each OEM releases a slightly older or newer buld depending on random reasons. I have used bleeding edge builds on various mobos without issue but that is something for personal preference.
I honestly can' remeber if you can flash v7 to v8 as it has beren a while since I have however last year for releaser of Ivy Bridge, Cougar Point (7 series) and Win8 some mobo vendors such as ASrock did a complete overhaul of their UEFI BIOS and updated all of the modules to the latest standard.
Z77 boards should have come with v8 or v8.1 ME anyway, I can't see why theyd ship a v7.
ASUS provided a end-user recommended update to 8.1 to 'enhance windows 8' as above.
Intel Desktop Boards support 8.1 also.
One wonders why they dont take this approach with the RAID OROM, as its just a BIOS module anyway.
NitroWare - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
I forgot to add that some third party vendors such as NEC-Renesas and ASmedia make it painful to flash the firmware for their products. ASmedia needs a DOS boot disk afaik.Some other vendors make it dead easy.
Why do you feel a one touch OC key is needed? Do you not think this is a gimic? It may be handy for bench testing but everything should be point and click or at least front bay controlled once the system is built up.
Sabresiberian - Saturday, January 26, 2013 - link
One of my "pet peeves" with mainboards is that the socket layout is terrible on pretty much all of them - regardless of size of board. They don't even take advantage of having more room in an E-ATX, XL-ATX, or what have you.This board has one of the best layouts I's seen in the sense that I could actually install 2 PCIe-1 devices even after installing 3 graphics cards! Unfortunately, that would make the graphics cards run on 8x-4x-4x and isn't enough for me, but still, it is a tempting board just for the socket layout. Most boards won't even allow for 1 PCIe-1 device if you have 3 graphics cards installed. It's ridiculous, in my opinion.
I love the color, too. Nice thing about black - it pretty much goes with anything, so even if my memory and graphics cards didn't match in color scheme, the mainboard wouldn't really add to a color confusion explosion. The yellow areas are small enough that they won't have much of an impact (I think).
I have built more computers based on MSI mainboards (hence my exposure to and acceptance of a term I like better, "mainboard" :) ) than any other brand, and they've always been reliable. I tend to prefer Asus these days for high end, but would always consider an MSI offering.
mayankleoboy1 - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - link
With someVRM moving to the CPU in Haswell, i expect the mobo to get a cleaner layout. Or that the space could be used for cramming some additional stuff. Not sure which i would prefer....cjb110 - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - link
You mention that there's no help on-screen, but are the BIOS settings detailed in the manual though?As I'd say that's acceptable, maybe not for the target market (that would more likely be changing settings regularly), but for a general user a once-off trip to the BIOS with the manual next to you would be fine.
peterwhitehouse - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - link
Surely this is not true for Windows 8 as that has native USB 3.0 support?Perhaps if we ever see a Windows 7 SP2 that may possibly support USB 3.0 natively as well.
peterwhitehouse - Monday, January 28, 2013 - link
I have checked this today and Windows 8 does indeed support USB 3.0 ports during install as suspected so I guess we can cross off having lots of USB 3.0 ports on the rear as being a possible downside.