MSI Z97I GAMING AC Motherboard Review

Next the GPGPU memory, FPS and FLOPS results with the memory again showing the standard trend, not much between the two motherboards at all.

Single Precision FLOPS has something of an increase, Double Precision FLOPS is identical.

Now we have a tangible increase in performance over the older generation Chipset. Overall we don’t see much of a difference, certainly not a generation gap between the two Chipsets and motherboards. The Z97 Chipset could maybe have been called the Z87B and it would have made more sense.

Conclusion

This motherboard is aimed at gamers and it has all the right features excluding SLi. During our game tests we did not feel the need for SLi, justifying the little motherboard in its own right. You can get a GTX970 or 770, as we did, into most modern mITX Chassis, combing with this motherboard to make an excellent high end gamer rig or Steam Box. With the prices of DDR4 still high and the Z97 still a mainstream motherboard, you can buy 16 GB of fast DDR3, drop in a high end graphics card and you will be sorted for some time.

We cannot really fault the MSI Z97I other than the MSI update tool, but you do not need to use it. The Wi-Fi add-on is down to personal preference, we do not mind because we extensively use power line adaptors, Wi-Fi is not a gamer’s choice in our opinion. Would you upgrade from the MSI Z87I AC Gaming mITX motherboard? It is a tricky answer, but from our point of view yes. The PCIe, M.2 and other small revisions make for an overall improvement over its predecessor. Defiantly some of the benchmarks show no improvement but gaming results, storage and LAN, cable or Wi-Fi, show an improvement and some of them are too much to ignore.