MSI H97I AC Motherboard Review – Big Features at Reasonable Cost!

BIOS FEATURES 

Those of you who are familiar with MSI’s BIOS this is more of the same, this time with the “Military Class” skin showcasing the OC Gene function, displaying temperatures, system information, settings, overclocking functionality, firmware flashing, saved profiles, hardware monitor and the board explorer.

Here we see the settings on this board, with some Windows 8/8.1 optimizations, Integrated peripherals, Integrated graphics configuration, Intel Rapid Start, USB configuration power management and more.

OVERCLOCKING

For Overclocking we have all the basics on Haswell, things like Ring Ratio might confuse some, the quick explanation is it is the speed of your cache, it is recommended to leave this at the same speed as your core clocks, but we have noticed almost no difference in performance with higher ring frequency, and is generally okay to leave this to auto.

To change the value on the overclocking settings you simply hover the mouse over the CPU ratio number and type in the multiplier, this is a bit different from most motherboards and we noticed the same thing on the MSI G55 SLI Z97 board as well, which is also a Military class board. The voltage is left to auto in this case but the goal we went for was 4.4 GHz below 1.22V.

This is the stock CPU settings, of course C1E Support and C State is disabled as per our SSD Optimization Guide, but this is here for reference. It is generally not a good idea to change motherboard settings if you are unsure of what they do if you are new to working in a BIOS.

Also we have the built in hardware monitor here, a very nice feature with the ability to set a fan curve for the CPU fan and single system fan header.