Introduction

I can easily admit that the one brand to have impressed me the most with this generation's board products is MSI. Their recently launched products, from top to bottom, are a complete diversion from their products of old, and the attention to detail and complete design focus are both so fresh and new that reviewing their GAMING series of products these past few months has been a pleasure. My old MSI P35 NEO2-FIR using SKT 775 is still churning away in my friend's daily PC, but it isn't without problems, and those problems existed since day one. Playing with the MSI Z87-GD65 GAMING, Z77-GD65 GAMING, and Z87-G45 GAMING was an entirely different experience as an enthusiast—rather than providing a limited list of options to choose from in BIOS, MSI now has a fully customizable one. Their boards also debut a new sleek esthetic with minimal amounts of color, one that goes well with a host of other enthusiast-grade parts. However, the GAMING brand is not all that's new at MSI.

MSI's high-end, enthusiast-focused MPOWER line-up caters to those favoring MSI's Lightning brand of high-end videocards. The Lightning brand of videocards, built around maximizing overclocks and breaking world records, features MSI's own custom PCB designs with boosted power delivery and additional voltage-tweaking capabilities. Clocking VGAs as hard as MSI intends requires a strong platform to plug that Lightning VGA into, and the MPOWER brand of motherboards is designed to be that base. With overclocking as the first priority, MSI sent me their MSI Z87 MPOWER MAX to take my Haswell CPU to the limit, or should I say to the MAX?

Specifications