MSI Z97I Gaming AC mini-ITX 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: ASUS’ Z97I-PLUS was tested with its ‘MultiCore Enhancement’ option left enabled. This means that the CPU was clock-boosted, which will result in improved performance over MSI’s Z97I Gaming AC, which ran at absolute stock, CPU-wise. Also, because the design of the MSI board prevented me from using the same tall memory sticks I had used for testing the ASUS board with, the specs are dissimilar. The MSI board was tested with 8GB of memory spec’d at DDR3-1866 – a stark contrast to the 16GB of DDR3-2133 we normally use. A difference in hardware like this isn’t ideal, but this particular motherboard forced my hand. None of our tests exhaust 8GB of memory, so the sole difference here will be via the frequency.

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).

Both boards perform well here, with ASUS getting the slight edge that we expected it would.

I/O Performance

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

I mentioned at the top of the page that with stock clocks, one board should perform like another. One exception to that rule though is I/O; component choices and general board design can make a sizeable difference. It’s interesting, then, that despite a boosted CPU clock being unable to improve performance here, ASUS’ board still comes out on top here. The differences are minor, of course, but it’s still interesting to note.

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.

The free performance boost the ASUS board gives us shines through in these results. It should be noted that even for an inexperienced user, achieving similar boosts on the MSI board would not be difficult. It’s just that ASUS removes the need to pursue that boost (whether or not that’s a good thing is dependant on your perspective).

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).

All looks good, with ASUS once again hading a nice little edge thanks to its ‘MultiCore Enhancement’ boost.