The Board - Layout

The styling offered by MSI's MPOWER Series of products has a definite esthetic that is all its own, matching MSI's Lightning line-up of VGA cards pretty closely with its lines of yellow on the heatsinks. The rest of the board is black, on both front and back, hiding the complexity of the board well.


The front of the socket is completely surrounded by the heatsink or DIMM slots, yet there is still plenty of room for aftermarket coolers and insulation because of MSI's component choices. The rear of the socket is amazingly clear of everything, with a big white square showing MSI's attention to this specific design aspect.


Featuring three PCIe x16 slots and four PCIe x1 slots, each dressed in black, the MSI Z87 MPOWER MAX has a normal compliment of expansion slots. The matching black DIMM slots can run DIMMS in excess of 3000 MHz pretty easily, with support for DIMMs of up to 8 GB in size per slot.


The board's bottom edge has the normal USB and fan headers, but also a bunch of buttons I'll touch on later.


There are a total of five PWM-based fan headers on the MSI Z87 MPOWER MAX. Each is controllable via the BIOS and software, provided the proper type of fan is used. There's also one mSATA slot between the PCIe slots for those that like those drives as much as I do.


The rear I/O section is pretty standard for a gaming product. It includes PS/2 and many USB ports, and the usual audio plugs. For video connectivity, there are dual HDMI ports and a DisplayPort on the back. The MSI Z87 MPOWER MAX has two extra SATA 6 Gb/s ports, bringing the total number of drives supported up to eight.