MSI Z270 Gaming M7 Review
Published by Luca Rocchi on 11.05.17Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| A closer look at the motherboard lineup from MSI reveals that the Z270 Gaming M7 is an upper mid-range model, regarding their gaming branded products. Of course it comes with some really neat features, like for example Game Boost and the new updated UEFI BIOS. The MSI Z270 Gaming M7 is powered by an 8-phase CPU VRM, which is usually enough for an overclocked system even if you want to do extreme benching using liquid nitrogen as coolant, neverthelss we would choose another model from the MSI Z270 portfolio for that purpose. Continuing on the feature list we find a beefed-up audio solution as well as the latest Killer E2500 Ethernet chip. The Killer LAN chip always comes bundled with a good software, which for example allows traffic shaping. Apart from that there is an adequate bundle, containing everything necessary to start building a new rig. | -
Design - Layout - Features - 3 x M.2 x4 Gen 3.0 Slots |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Overall, the MSI Z270 Gaming M7's layout has been well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors that you can find on almost all motherboards nowadays. Other than that there are internal USB 3.1 as well as USB 3.0 headers. In addition there are practical power- and reset-buttons paired with a debug display. This one is always highly useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Apart from that there are three full-sized PCI Express Gen3 slots (with Steel Armor), which have been very well positioned. You also get three PCIe Gen3 x1 connectors onboard, and they can be found in between the PCIe slot as well as on top of the first full-sized PCIe slot. Furthermore the Gaming M7 has also been equipped with three M.2 x4 Gen 3 slots. | - Angled SATA connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - Audio Solution |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 14th. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board comes in 9th out of 31 boards tested. On another note, we had a look at power consumption and since this is a board with many features, energy efficiency is average, whereas load power consumption is one of the highest we've measured so far. | |||
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| MSI has put a lot of time and effort into making their BIOS look nicer and more user friendly. Especially when we compare this version of MSI BIOS to the first UEFI BIOS from MSI, it simply cannot be compared, since the two are worlds apart. What's almost self-explanatory is that you get a lot of tuning and tweaking options in order to optimize the system towards your needs. We also like the entry screen which displays a lot of useful information. Apart from that overclocking our test CPU to 5.2 GHz was straight forward and there were no issues whatsoever. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The Z270 Gaming M7 is a well equipped Z270 motherboard. This board ranks in the center span of both our 2D and 3D benchmarks. At the moment this is the first MSI Z270 Gaming motherboard that we have in our charts and comparing to models based on the Intel's Z170 chipset it's a bit quicker. We chose to use an Intel Core i7-6700K processor to be able to compare the performance with other models we've reviewed previously reviewed. This motherboard offers a reasonable feature set yet the price of 240 Euro excluding shipping costs is a bit steep, although all Z270 are anything but a bargain. | -
Gaming - Enthusiast - Overclocking |
- Price | |
| System von MIFCOM | |||
| Should you be looking for an individually configurable system, which can be equipped with this motherboard, then we recommend you the Gaming Mini-PC Core i7-7700K from MIFCOM. | |||
| Rating | |||
| We give the MSI Z270 Z270 Gaming M7 good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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