One of our biggest problems with the
rise of the mini-ITX motherboard is the price premium that always seems to come
with them. In exchange for removing slots and features, manufacturers seem to
want to charge you for waste removal, too. If the boards are smaller, with
fewer components, doesn’t that make them ultimately cheaper to produce?
We know it’s not that simple, though –
the mini-ITX form factor is still comparatively niche compared with the ATX
standard, so there aren’t as many boards being made, which in turn helps keep
the prices nice and high.
One
of our biggest problems with the rise of the mini-ITX motherboard is the price
premium that always seems to come with them. In exchange for removing slots and
features, manufacturers seem to want to charge you for waste removal, too.
Knowing something and liking it are
very different things though, so we’re always very pleased when someone bucks
the trend a little. MSI has done that with its Z87I board. This is a $163.62
mobo of the mini-ITX persuasion that somehow retains a very competitive feature
set and some impressive metrics, too.
Less is more
When you first pull the Z87I from its
simple white box, the basic-looking board layout is what strikes you first.
There are none of the RoG’s raised power components here – ie, combi cards or
extra shards of audio cards. It’s just a little square of black PCB with a big
socket for the chip and seemingly not much else.
But what else do you really need in a
small form factor gaming machine? It’s already got a PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots, a
pair of DDR3 DIMM slots, full SATA 6Gbps storage capabilities, USB 3.0 ports
and Wi-Fi card already fitted into its mini PCIe connection. So yeah, it’s
pretty well kitted out already and is still around $124 cheaper than Asus’
masterpiece of a motherboard, mind.
When
you first pull the Z87I from its simple white box, the basic-looking board
layout is what strikes you first.
It’s slower than the RoG board, but
not by much – certainly not enough to make you think that $124 extra might be
worth it. It will be worth noting the difference between an i5-4670K and
i7-4770K isn’t far off that. Just putting it out there and backing away…
The general synthetic performance
isn’t too far behind, with the MSI in second place here in everything bar the
gaming benchmarks. This is the only real disappointment in testing the Z87I,
but you would actually be hard pushed to notice the difference in gaming
performance if you didn’t have the FPS numbers to hand. If you’re really
looking you can find a reason to give the win to the Asus board, but in reality
it’ll be tough to tell.
You would be better off spending the
cash differential on a quicker graphics card. That means you could build a very
well-priced gaming rig from this motherboard on the Intel platform.
Overclocking probably isn’t massively important if you’re going for a small
form factor machine either (which will upset the RoG Impact no end), so picking
up a non-K series i5 Haswell for around $248 would be a great pairing for this
bargain.
We’ve got to give props to MSI for
creating a very simple, impressively specced and reasonably powerful mini-ITX
motherboard without slapping a massive price premium on it. MSI could have
followed EVGA’s lead and released it with a big sticker price, but we’re hoping
the fact it’s gone for $163.7 is well rewarded. For such a decent board, it
certainly deserves to be.
The
general synthetic performance isn’t too far behind, with the MSI in second
place here in everything bar the gaming benchmarks.
|
Vital Statistics
·
Price: $163.7 ·
Manufacture:r
MSI ·
Chipset: Intel
Z87 ·
Socket: LGA 1150 ·
Memory: Up to
32GB @ 3,000MHz ·
Memory slots: 2x
DDR3 DIMM ·
Storage: 4x SATA
6Gbps ·
Ports: 4x USB
3.0, 2x USB 2.0, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort
|
