MSI Z97 MPOWER MAX AC (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Overclocking

Overclocking went exactly to plan: we know our 4770K cannot do more than 4.8GHz without overheating from the additional volts required to get to 4.9GHz and unsurprisingly we topped out at 4.8GHz on this motherboard. We needed 1.275 volts to achieve 4.8GHz which is a strong showing from this motherboard and we can see the 12 phase VRM doing its job. In reality the 12 phase VRM is massive overkill for Haswell CPUs because the VRM is controlled on-die but nonetheless it is great to have such a powerful overclocking motherboard. We also had a brief play around with our Devil’s Canyon Core i7 4790K CPU but our Core i7 4770K actually clocks higher than it. For some reason MSI’s core voltage readout seems to be dysfunctional in CPU-Z but we can assure you 1.275 volts were used and provided. We didn’t see any voltage droop issues when overclocking, we think MSI have fixed that issue since some reviewers noticed it at Z97 launch.