MSI Z87I Review: Mini-ITX Haswell for $140
by Ian Cutress on August 27, 2013 10:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- Mini ITX
- Z87
Metro2033
Our first analysis is with the perennial reviewers’ favorite, Metro2033. It occurs in a lot of reviews for a couple of reasons – it has a very easy to use benchmark GUI that anyone can use, and it is often very GPU limited, at least in single GPU mode. Metro2033 is a strenuous DX11 benchmark that can challenge most systems that try to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 1440p with full graphical settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from a second batch of 4 runs, as Metro has a tendency to inflate the scores for the first batch by up to 5%.
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Dirt 3 also falls under the list of ‘games with a handy benchmark mode’. In previous testing, Dirt 3 has always seemed to love cores, memory, GPUs, PCIe lane bandwidth, everything. The small issue with Dirt 3 is that depending on the benchmark mode tested, the benchmark launcher is not indicative of game play per se, citing numbers higher than actually observed. Despite this, the benchmark mode also includes an element of uncertainty, by actually driving a race, rather than a predetermined sequence of events such as Metro 2033. This in essence should make the benchmark more variable, but we take repeated in order to smooth this out. Using the benchmark mode, Dirt 3 is run at 1440p with Ultra graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.
Civilization V
A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V. Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews. With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below. Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.
Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file. We report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.
Sleeping Dogs
While not necessarily a game on everybody’s lips, Sleeping Dogs is a strenuous game with a pretty hardcore benchmark that scales well with additional GPU power due to its SSAA implementation. The team over at Adrenaline.com.br is supreme for making an easy to use benchmark GUI, allowing a numpty like me to charge ahead with a set of four 1440p runs with maximum graphical settings.
GPU Conclusions
Despite the computational discrepancies we have seen on the Z87I, the gaming benchmarks perform well – very few of our benchmarks show much difference when dealing with a single discrete GPU at 1440p. The only ‘low’ result is perhaps Sleeping Dogs using a 7970, although the difference between 27.60 FPS and 28.10 FPS will not be noticeable.
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BansheeX - Tuesday, August 27, 2013 - link
For $20 more, you can get the Asrock Z87E-ITX, which has an mSATA port on the back and a better audio DAC.abscoder - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
+1 So far the Asrock Z87E-ITX has been serving me very well. Built a 12TB HTPC/file server around one.Hixbot - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
I personally have no need for a DAC on my motherboard. I'll use the digital output and my own DAC thank-you very much.8steve8 - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
is this shipping with the c2 stepping?the tech media is amazingly quiet about the usb3 lga1150 bug... and the coming fix.
they are also quiet about i7-4770r lack of availability, along with any iris pro solution actually being buyable... is everyone waiting for c2 chipsets to launch significant products with haswell?
meacupla - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
The reason for that is because the Haswell USB3.0 bug is not that relevant in desktops. It affects notebooks more and only affects USB3.0 storage devices when waking up from an S3 state, in which the data becomes unreadable off of the device.So unless you never turn your computer off, always have some sort of USB3.0 device connected and set aggressive power saving, you will be completely unaffected by the bug.
i7-4770R is BGA and needs to be packaged together with a mobo, so it's only natural that it has a slower development cycle. It's also likely that it's going to get a similar treatment to NUC or BRIX, so that's going to be an even longer delay.
8steve8 - Thursday, August 29, 2013 - link
not relevant on desktops? any computer that goes to s3 is effected...most people don't turn "off" their computer anymore... they let it idle and sleep.
lots of people use USB storage devices, when they plug in their phone its a usb storage device, their camera, their backup external HDD, etc.. some people use USB drives as their primary storage for music/movies..
you don't have to "always have" a usb device connected... just once... and you may see the bug.
I think more people should be aware of it, and yet no one is talking about it.... not enough.
It's on the worst thing in the world, but either is waiting a month or two for the fix.
I imagine apple is buying all the iris pro cpus up and will ship computers with them when c2 is ready...
8steve8 - Thursday, August 29, 2013 - link
correction:It's not the worst thing int he world, but either is waiting a month for the fixed hardware.
meacupla - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
CPU socket area looks low, like the majority of Z77/H77 mITX boards that also couldn't fit a high performance dual tower heatsink.lopper - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
Wish my vishera could be in mini-itx without blowing itself up.jardows2 - Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - link
I stopped reading when I saw the mini pci-e slot taken up by a wireless card. It doesn't look like you could fit a mSATA card without interfering with the CPU Heatsink. Again, another model packing all sorts of features that I will not use.