MSI Z97 Gaming 9 AC Motherboard Review

From a performance perspective, we feel that motherboard benchmarking is useless. It’s the motherboard’s job to allow all of the installed hardware to operate at its full potential, so in theory, a $100 option shouldn’t be much (or any) slower than a $300 one. The differences in price instead comes down to the quality of the onboard components and other features.

So why do it at all? It’s because it’s important to make sure that the board we’re dealing with doesn’t lack in one particular area versus the rest. If board A performs 2% slower than board B in PCMark, for example, that’s of no concern to us – random benchmark variance is a fact of life. However, if one board consistently performs weaker than the rest, that’s worthy of note – it could suggest that weaker components have been used which do not allow the hardware to operate at its full potential.

Please bear this in mind when perusing our results. Just because a board under-performs in a single test, it doesn’t mean anything in regards to its quality as a whole. Our ultimate goal here is to make sure that each board we test performs as we’d expect across the gamut of scenarios we pit them against.

Our Intel Z97 Testing OS (Wallpaper Credit)

Note: In some cases, one motherboard will perform better than another because a boost is applied to the CPU in the default configuration. Sometimes, that boost is caused when one of the XMP profiles is selected; in that case, the vendor just assumes you’re fine with a CPU overclock. ASUS’ “Multi-Core Enhancement” is one setting that will boost things, and it happens to be on by default on the tested Z97I-PLUS. While MSI’s Z97I Gaming AC didn’t apply a boost anywhere – something evident in the results – I’d guess that the full-blown Gaming 9 AC did, as it matches ASUS’ output. Alas, it’s hard to do apples-to-apples comparisons with motherboards nowadays, but as mentioned above, the goal here is to make sure no board falls behind due to being built using poor components.

Increasing the BCLK value is one way that vendors could sneak in some higher-than-stock performance numbers, so after letting the test bench sit idle for a couple of minutes, we look at the current BCLK value as according to CPU-Z.

General System Performance

To take a look at the “overall” performance of our PC configuration, we rely on dual Futuremark suites: PCMark 8 and 3DMark (2013).

MSI’s big boy board matches ASUS’ ITX, while MSI’s ITX falls a bit behind – possibly due to the fact that slower RAM had to be used in that build, thanks to build complications.

I/O Performance

To properly give the internal SATA 6Gbps a good workout, we turn to HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark.

Interestingly, MSI’s ITX board outperformed the Gaming 9 AC in all of these tests, aside from the USB one. The differences are minimal, and are not going to be noticed in the real-world, but it’s noteworthy nonetheless.

Rendering & Image Manipulation

Writing files to disk or reading a website doesn’t do much to exercise our CPU, so for that, we turn to a few common scenarios – image editing, video rendering, music conversion, and 3D rendering.

MSI’s Gaming 9 AC might have fallen a bit short in the SATA tests, but stands its ground in these performance tests. It doesn’t manage to keep head-to-head with ASUS’ board, but it doesn’t fall behind, either.

Sub-system Performance

For memory and CPU testing, we utilize SiSoftware’s Sandra 2013 (SP3a), and for Ethernet testing, we use iperf (or more appropriately, the Java-based jperf which utilizes it).

Once again, the Gaming 9 AC performs well overall, outperforming its ITX sibling, but coming a bit short to ASUS’ board – due possibly to the fact that ASUS is a little more aggressive with its clock boost.

Other MSI Z97 Gaming 9 AC Features & Final Thoughts

As I did on the last page, I’m borrowing some of the text from my Z97I Gaming AC board review to use here as it still applies. Overall, the feature set of these boards is almost identical – it’s the size, additional accessories, and extra expansion slots / ports that sets the Gaming 9 AC apart from its ITX little brother. So, let’s wrap this up.

Features I haven’t talked too much about up to this point are those related to the audio and networking, so let’s fix that.

For networking, MSI’s chosen to go with the gamer-targeted Killer Ethernet E2200 series card (2205 to be exact). While I can’t discredit that this solution is great for gaming, past experiences with it have left me not liking it much at all. The biggest issue I have with it might not affect many who buy this board, but it bugs me nonetheless: There’s no official Linux driver. That could be remedied via a wrapper or another driver for a similar chipset, but don’t expect a distro to take care of it for you.

Personally, I’d much rather the board include an Intel NIC and custom software that replicates the same gaming enhancements, like ASUS does with its motherboards (even the non-gaming ones). Nonetheless, as long as you know that Linux support is appalling for this chipset, and you might experience the odd niggle (I still have the driver crash on my personal board from time to time), the card does come with a boat load of features tailored to gaming.

To me, the highlight of this board isn’t the NIC (obviously), but the audio. I’m no audiophile, so I can’t properly review this solution, but my experiences with it overall are good. With Audio Boost 2, MSI helps “boost” the audio with Creative’s Sound Blaster Cinema 2, and I admit, I prefer listening to audio like this. Even with my Xonar card on my regular desktop, I enable “Dolby Headphone” because I like the much boomier sound (see, I’m not an audiophile).

That’s not all that makes the audio solution interesting. On the board itself, the card is isolated to keep the signal away from other components, and improving things further, an EMI shield is found near the top of the board. Other perks include dual headphone amplifiers (supporting headphones up to 600ohms), Nichicon capacitors specifically for the audio, and, while I’m not sure of its actual benefit, gold audio connectors at the back.

For the final audio-related enhancement, MSI really pulled no punches. “USB Audio Power” ensures that all USB ports get a “strong 5V” power signal at all times – potentially useful for those who use external DACs, or perhaps even USB-based headsets.

Looking beyond networking and audio, the Gaming 9 AC offers a serious amount of features. While I kind of would have liked to have seen 10 SATA ports, I admit that most people wouldn’t take advantage of so many – and this is a board that caters to gamers, not the general enthusiast. What is quite nice, though, is the ability to install an M.2 SSD. I am still unsure if I’d do this with my next build, but it is kind of tempting.

On the software side, the fact that this board supports SteamOS out-of-the-box is great, although I’m not too sure that many people would have those sorts of plans for a board like this. It’s also kind of nice that MSI bundles in a six-month subscription to XSplit Gamecaster, but with so many other completely free game recording / streaming tools available, the software might be a hard sell beyond those six months.

Ultimately, this board has a bit of everything for everyone. It’s a gaming-focused board, but it has a number of niceties to cater to the regular enthusiast, and even the overclocker. On the OCing side, it’s nice to have the option to make use of onboard voltage points, and the power / reset buttons at the top (these are far from being uncommon, but they’re still great to have). I also appreciate the fact that the board includes an LED BIOS readout – something that gets highlighted to me everytime I troubleshoot a board that doesn’t have one.

Given all that the Z97 Gaming 9 AC offers, is it worth its cost-of-entry (~$290)? I’d say for the serious gamer, or anyone wanting a well-rounded high-end board, it definitely is. Admittedly, the Z97I Gaming AC, while a great board, left me a little flustered due to some of the build complications I had (which admittedly, were entirely my fault). Moving over to this board felt like a breath of fresh air – I simply loved it. It’s hard not to when a board offers so many good features and other perks.

Overall, a seriously good board. If there’s only one thing it makes me want even more, it might be the X99S Gaming 9 AC. Hot damn.

MSI Z97 Gaming 9 AC