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

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our motherboard’s slightly different depending upon the product’s marketed purpose, whether it be an entry-level budget motherboard or a high-end enthusiast level motherboard.  Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your system performs the way it should.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

When we test various PC hardware, we like to use benchmarks that are readily available for you to download and test for yourself. In our analysis today we will be using FutureMark’s PCMark 8 and Cinebench 15 to test overall system and CPU performance as well as other utilities such as AIDA64 for monitoring and testing overclocks.

OVERCLOCKING

We were able to hit 4.4 GHz at 1.250V, anything higher we couldn’t get stable. We are still very happy with this result, even though higher end boards may be able to get more, for this price we would imagine an i5 should be able to get 4.0GHz stable.

CPU BENCHMARKS 

For our CPU Benchmarks, We tested our motherboard at stock and overclocked to 4.4GHz

PCMARK8 – CREATIVE 2.0

We see the overclock helps significantly here, giving us a 450 point jump, this is kind of disappointing as we would expect the overclock to do more.

CINEBENCH R15

CINEBENCH is based on CINEMA 4D, which is used often by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in many blockbuster movies. This test scenario pushes all of your system’s processing cores to the limit to render a photorealistic 3D scene. This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processing cores.

We see a strong improvement here with a 35% performance increase, so if you plan on working with similar applications we definitely would recommend overclocking.

STORAGE BENCHMARKS 

For testing storage, we did two separate benchmarks, one with AS-SSD and another real-world file transfer between two SSDs using DiskBench to measure the results.

AS SSD

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance.  For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs.

From our results here we can clearly see the SSD is performing very close to the results it got in its testing by The SSD Review.