MSI H97I AC Motherboard Review – Big Features at Reasonable Cost!

DISKBENCH 

In  this test, we copied a game directory that was over 30GB with 512 files, between two SSDs. The results are displayed in megabytes per second.

Rather impressive results from our board here. We see that this MSI motherboard is no slouch when it comes to SATA speeds!

7-ZIP

Here we can see the improvement gained from this overclock, and thanks to this motherboard it does pretty well here.

GAMING BENCHMARKS 

3D MARK11 FIRESTRIKE EXTREME

3DMark 11’s Fire Strike Extreme is one of the most intensive graphical benchmarks available. It is reserved for testing ultra high-end gaming machines with multiple graphics cards or overclocked CPUs

We see a small improvement here since this test is rather GPU bound, 10% is still respectable though.

TOMB RAIDER (2013)

The most recent iteration of Crystal Dynamic’s long-running series, Tomb Raider represents one of the best-looking titles on PC to date. Its varied landscapes and beautiful organic environments create a quite graphically demanding title.

We this game on “Ultimate” with TressFX and FXAA at 1080p. MSAA is disabled.

We can see in Tomb Raider,  our average FPS gets up only a little bit, Tomb Raider isn’t much of a CPU bound game though. We will say the overclock helped a little bit but the bottleneck here is definitely the GPU.  We would turn it down to medium to get a playable experience.

CRYSIS 3

Crysis is definitely more playable with our overclock. That being said playing on medium settings proved to help quite a bit to make this game playable.

FINAL THOUGHTS AND CONCLUSION 

Overall we thought for a Mini-ITX build, this board is fantastic! It might seem expensive, but this board has a ton of value for what it is packing. Other brands have similar boards, but are not in the same price category. Although this is not an amazing overclock by any means, it got respectable clock speeds on the Pentium G3258 and we imagine that an i7 or i5 would get clock speeds near 4GHz.

BLCK Overclocking is not an option though because of the 4+1 Phase Power design, as we couldn’t get it even 1MHz over the stock speed. SATA storage performance was solid and was about average compared to most full ATX boards. So for those looking to build a LAN rig, HTPC, or other small form factor PC this board does the job well and then some.

While it is missing some of the bells and whistles shown on most other full sized boards, this thing packs a punch! With that we give it our Technology X Silver Seal!

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