MSI Z77IA-E53 Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. MSI Z77IA-E53: Design and Layout3. MSI Z77IA-E53: BIOS and Overclocking4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: 3DMark 116. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: PCMark 78. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven9. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201210. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.511. Synthetic: Super Pi12. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark13. Real World: Media Encoding14. Real World: MKV Playback15. Gaming: DiRT 316. Gaming: Grand Theft Auto 4 EFLC17. Technical: Power Consumption18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

UEFI Interface

After pressing the DEL key to enter the BIOS, we are greeted by an attractive looking UEFI interface.  The main page features a series of large tabs which let us access the different configuration options.  There is some basic information about the system and a few settings displayed in the bar along the top of the page which can be accessed at all times.

Clicking the ‘Settings' tab brings up a long list of different options which can be configured.

The ‘OC' tab is the most exciting.  Here we find all the settings we could possibly ask for to squeeze the best possible performance from the motherboard.

The ‘ECO' mode button lets us configure some of the motherboard's power saving options.  MSI have also included a ‘Browser' into the UEFI but we doubt many users will bother using this as it takes almost as much time to get to as booting into windows.

Under the ‘Utilities' tab there are three options; HDD Backup, Live BIOS update and the M-Flash updating utility.

The final ‘Security' tab lets us set an administrator password to protect the BIOS configuration.

Overclocking

Until recently, it hasn't really been possible to overclock mini-ITX systems due to the limitations of the power regulation circuitry.  A few weeks back we reviewed the ASRock Z77E-ITX which impressed us with its overclocking prowess.

We decided to use an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler to test the Z77IA-E53 as it uses a push-pin mounting mechanism and won't foul any of the components on the reverse of the motherboard.  This isn't a very powerful cooler but is good enough for a moderate overclock.

For our benchmarks we used an overclock of 4.6 GHz which was achieved by raising the CPU ratio to 46x and bumping the core voltage to 1.22V.  Under full load the CPU hit 87 degrees which won't cause any issues long term.

See validation here.

Become a Patron!