MSI Z87I Gaming AC (LGA 1150) Mini-ITX Review

Overclocking

Another day and another predictable Core i7 4770K overclocking session. If you’ve read any of our other recent Z87 motherboard reviews our Core i7 4770K sample only does 4.8GHz stable enough to benchmark. Any higher than that and the voltage increases required to get it to 4.9 or 5 cause the CPU to overheat and throttle lower than 4.8GHz. Of course anyone that knows about Haswell will also know that the overclocking isn’t really limited by your motherboard because most of the VRM is on-die or controlled on-die. Therefore it isn’t at all surprising that the MSI Z87I Gaming AC motherboard easily maxed out our Core i7 4770K chip at 4.8GHz with 1.2975 vcore. There was flexibility in achieving this, you could use a fixed voltage, offset voltage or adaptive voltage and they all worked fine. Mileage may vary between  set ups and we do know that most Core i7 4770Ks struggle to go beyond 4.4~ GHz. Our overclocking result would be a best case scenario for most people, but even we struggled to tame the temperatures with a Corsair H100i, as our Core i7 4770K ran into the high 80s and low 90s just from short load scenarios.