- Date:
- Wednesday, June 18, 2014
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:

MSI Z97 Gaming 7 LGA 1150 Motherboard Review
We’ve been fans of MSI’s "Gaming" series for some time now. The Z97 Gaming 7 has big shoes to fill and competition is heating up as competitors take a page from MSI’s book and bring some of respective offerings into parity with MSI’s price points. Does MSI still have what it takes to rule this particular market? We are about to find out.
Overclocking
Overclocking was almost a magical experience on the Z97 Gaming 7. Starting off with OC Genie I achieved a result of 4.0GHz which by itself is virtually useless when our stock speed with Turbo enabled is pretty close to that. OC Genie was once the pinnacle of automated overclocking and today it’s a shell of what it once was. It’s now probably the worst in terms of actual performance gains. However there was one unexpected benefit to OC Genie this time. For the first time ever OC Genie was able to set my RAM for DDR3 2400MHz speeds with four modules and maintain absolute stability. This is impressive to say the least as many motherboards don’t let me do that manually.
4.0GHz (100x40) DDR3 2400MHz (4x DIMMs)
This is the point where I’d love to tell you about settings and technique for producing a given overclock but in this case it’s quite the opposite. I set the CPU VCore and that’s it. I literally touched nothing else to reach a clock speed of 4.7GHz at DDR3 2400MHz speeds with full 100% long term stability. Not only could the MSI Z97 Gaming 7 do this, but it did so with four DIMMs installed rather than two.
This is unfortunately the upper end of what this particular CPU is generally capable of. I’ve taken it as high as 4.8GHz once or twice, but to do so seems to require the stars to align in a specific way. It seems capable of this in the winter time when ambient temperatures in my office are a bit on the low side. Our 4770K ES was able to achieve this result at only 1.3v which is slightly higher than it normally took on Z87 based motherboards and the temperatures were right around the 85c mark at most. This is absolutely in line with what I saw on last generation’s Z87 motherboards minus having to apply a little more voltage.
4.7GHz (100x47) DDR3 2400MHz (4x DIMMs)
All in all the MSI Z97 Gaming 7 is the best overclocker I’ve worked with thus far with this Z97 generation. It was absolutely drama free and exceeded my expectations. I think 4.8GHz is possible even with my CPU on this thing but it would either take a significant amount of time to dial in the right setting for it or I’d have to wait until a nice and cool day to do so. In any case I was definitely impressed by the Z97 Gaming 7 when it came to overclocking. MSI has reached a point where its automated tuning rules are getting pretty solid. Unfortunately, the auto rules that govern the operation of the motherboard while I’m just ratcheting up the turbo multiplier and CPU voltage don’t apply to the OC Genie which is difficult for me to grasp.
Conclusions
Dan's Thoughts:
The MSI Z97 Gaming 7 was easily the most hassle free Z97 motherboard I’ve worked with to date. My experiences with it were completely flawless aside from a couple of nagging issues with the design of the Command Center software. I won’t go so far as to call the software atrocious but it’s definitely not on par with the competition. I don’t think that really matters at the end of the day given the other areas the Z97 Gaming 7 excels in. This is flat out the best Z97 motherboard I’ve tested so far this generation.
I simply can’t say enough good things about the MSI Z97 Gaming 7. Were I in the market for a LGA1150 based motherboard today I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on this one. So if you are in the market for such a motherboard then this one should be at the top of your list. It really is that good.
Kyle's Thoughts:
The MSI Z97 Gaming 7 was perfect out of the box. I immediately flashed the BIOS using the latest update from the MSI site and the process worked exactly as it should. Windows 7 installed without issue and the MSI automatic driver install worked well but did require a click or two to keep it going so it is not a click and leave application. With the Killer NIC I have lately simply bypassed installing the driver install and let Windows install its native driver, but this time Windows would not find a driver or let me force a native driver to be pushed into service, so I had to use the somewhat bothersome Killer NIC driver. Conversely I had issues installing the Sound Blaster drivers from the supplied DVD and the files direct from MSI's support site. Dan did not have this issue and I will touch on that again below. I finally let Windows handle the audio driver install and all worked fine after that.
I went on and set our in-house stock clocks of 4.5GHz CPU and 1866MHz RAM with a core voltage of 1.28v. I did see a higher CPU core voltage with CPUZ of 1.296v. Going into stability testing, we had some issues, but we have seen this with almost all of these Z97 motherboards to some extent except for the GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming G1 WiFi-BK. I could not get stability for more than an hour at full load with Prime95. After many attempts and a lot of communication with MSI, we decided the motherboard was the issue and MSI replaced it. The new MSI Z97 Gaming7 gave me much different results as it was stable for 4 hours with airflow across the motherboard. When I cut the airflow across the motherboard I found the system would BSOD under a full load stress test after about an hour. I was recording temperatures of 132F on the surface of the heatsink components and 150F on the surface of the chokes. I flashed the motherboard with the BETA BIOS that MSI sent me, version 1.22B, but it presented me with the same stability results. 4 hours with airflow; 1 hour without airflow. As mentioned above, MSI's are not the only Z97 motherboards we have seen similar stability results with running torture tests with Prime95. There have been some questions raised about the latest versions of Prime95 giving some unusually high temperatures during workloads. Moving on to a "real" workload like encoding full 1080p versions of full length movies showed us to have no issue. Also running AIDA64 did not show us stability issues either. So it is fully possible that we are seeing Prime95 issues with some of these new Z97 motherboards rather than issues with the motherboards.
This new motherboard would also install the audio drivers as well. This new motherboard also showed to have the same voltage issue with the CPU core voltage running 0.2v higher than set in the BIOS, which is not an issue if you are aware what is going on.
On the overclocking front I started with MSI's OC Genie button. As usual, it is somewhat anemic as it returned a 4GHZ result, but with a very low CPU core voltage of 1.21v. We are using 16GB of new Corsair Platinum Dominator RAM rated at 2400MHz. The MSI Z97 Gaming7 did recognize the RAM's XMP profile and set our RAM to run at the 2400MHz automatically. With manual overclocking in the BIOS I was able to easily return a 4.7GHz/2400MHz result similar to Dan's above. One interesting tool in MSI's software package is its Fast Boot utility that resides with the icons in the System Taskbar. It has a menu item that will allow you to reboot directly into the BIOS from the desktop, which is very handy while you are manually tweaking your clocks, timings, and voltages. Dan has already covered the MSI overclocking software and I share his thoughts on that, so I will not recap. As with all MSI motherboards, this one comes complete with Intel's MSI branded Extreme Tuning Utility and it is simply one of the best overclocking software tools you can use. While it does not have pre-built profiles it does have hooks into all the basic BIOS functions you need to get a successful overclock.
The Bottom Line
The MSI Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard is one great overclocking motherboard. That is sort of odd since it is dedicated to the "Gaming" brand by MSI. This segment of MSI's product stack, while not marketed to the hardcore enthusiast, surely stands up in the overclocking category. Being that it is a Gaming branded motherboard, it does carry a few less features, but that is surely reflected in its pricing of around $180 to $200. While we did see some long term stability issues under Prime95 loads, we did not see these in other stressful workload environments, which has been par for the course with many new Z97 motherboards we have reviewed. One of the features this Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard is missing is a robust power component cooling system like we see on more expensive motherboards. While the Z97 Gaming 7 is not the perfect motherboard, it does represent a solid value for the enthusiast looking to build a good system, but we would suggest keeping an eye on your case’s thermals and airflow, which you should be doing anyway. That would go a long way to making up for the budget oriented heatsinks found on the motherboard.







