The Board - A Closer Look

MSI's choice of componentry is similar to what we find on their other GAMING motherboards, which results in a feature set similar to its much larger MSI GAMING brethren. Monitoring duties and such are provided by a Nuvoton Super I/O chip.


Although a mITX motherboard, the MSI Z97I GAMING comes with a proper 8-pin EPS power connector, so you can push your CPU a fair bit without having to worry about there being enough power available. Equipped with a 6-phase CPU VRM, there is a fair bit of power stuffed onto the front of the board, squeezing the MSI AUDIO BOOST 2 design into the board's top-left corner, near the chipset itself.


Some sort of TMDS is hidden behind the VRM cooler, and I was not going pull the cooler off for a look since nearly every board maker is using an NXP-designed chip. I located the E2205 KillerNIC chip on the board's backside.


Getting all this stuff into a small mITX motherboard requires fairly complex board circuitry, which has MSI use an 8-layer PCB design with, highlighted by a box that allows you to peer through the layers, where each one has been numbered individually.


The tiny Intel Z97 PCH cooler is connected to the VRM cooler via a heatpipe, its tiny size barely large enough to fit MSI's GAMING SERIES logo on top, although there is enough here for nicely beveled red edges that add to the sophisticated esthetic. A single dragon claw also reaches out from the VRM portion to hold down a lump of black metal that provides some additional cooling, with the familiar silver dragon appearing on its side.