MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Let’s just say it now: red on black looks good... really good. Gaming motherboards from competing manufacturers have gone with this color combination as well, with good reason. All of the heatsinks are in the shape of a dragon and add some bling if you have a windowed case. Add to that the all solid caps, Killer NIC, and Creative Sound Cinema and MSI has got a real contender here.

The PCB on this board feels thick and heavy, a good sign of quality. MSI wisely placed the PCIe 16x as the second slot giving a little extra room for oversized CPU heat sinks or back-mounted watercooling radiators.

Everything on the board works well and there's plenty of fan headers. Overclocking is very easy and I encountered no stability issues.

This is one of the select motherboards that offers enhanced Intel turbo boost, also known as MultiCore Enhancement. What does that mean? On most motherboards, turbo mode is tiered based on how many CPU cores are being used. You get full turbo when only one CPU core is stressed. With motherboards that support this feature, you get full turbo even when all cores are loaded. This benefits any software that takes advantage of multiple cores such as games or video encoding. This feature is disabled in the BIOS by default, so be sure to enable it for a few free MHz.

Cons: The only bad thing that can be said about this motherboard is the layout. Unfortunately, it’s enough to dock an egg.

The SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports are too tall, at least they are on my sample. If you look at the layout, all six SATA ports on the right side of the board and are directly in line where a video card should be in the topmost PCIe 16x slot. The top two ports are the SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports and are a few millimeters taller than the four SATA ports below.

My video card bottoms out on these top SATA ports which prevent it from being fully seated in the PCIe slot. I have an HD6950, which is a 10” card, and was unable to insert it far enough to engage the PCIe lock. Because of this, the card was slightly askew when installed, although the card did work when the computer was booted. This is a less than ideal installation, however. 9" cards and shorter will have no troubles. It’s possible that on my individual board the SATA ports were not completely flush with the PCB when soldered, adding to the height of the ports.

Of course, one may elect to use one of the other PCIe 16x slots if fitment is an issue. However, despite what the motherboard description says, the second PCIe slot is 8x only. I confirmed with MSI tech support that even if you intend to run a single video card in the second slot, then it will run at 8x bus speed. As for the bottom PCIe slot, well it's PCIe 2.0 only and it does not allow double slot cards to be installed in a standard seven-slot ATX case.

Most cards do not need the full 16x bandwidth and will perform just as good at 8x speed. However, anyone who is considering SLI or CrossFire with long video cards may be forced to contend with that top PCIe 16x slot and the SATA ports.

Overall Review: The software that comes with this board is quite useful. One can change any BIOS setting from within Windows using the ClickBIOS II software. With the fast boot option of Windows 8 (which this board supports), it is important to have easy access to BIOS features within Windows.

MSI Control Center, on the other hand, is not completely trouble free. When the software is launched I get a pop up saying “Please replace the ME version!” but everything appears to work fine in the software after acknowledging the pop up. This should be fixed with a software update I suspect.

The iOS application that can be used on your Apple device is more of a novelty than a practical piece of software. Yes, you can change a few settings here and there and keep track of temperatures remotely using the app, but I find it hard to imagine a scenario where one would use the app rather than the computer itself. Perhaps if you were stress testing an overclock and wanted to keep tabs on the temperature while you’re away, it might be useful.

A couple of other layout issues to consider when looking at this motherboard is the USB 3.0 front panel header is turned 90° and the front panel pin header is not on the far right edge as is typical. Depending on your case, you may have trouble with these design choices by MSI. The front panel wires from my particular case just barely reached the pin-out and if you have a hard drive cage in the way you may lose the use of the USB 3.0 header.

In the end, what do you get with this board over the vanilla Z77A-G45 motherboard which costs less? Killer NIC, Creative Sound Cinema, and the red/black dragon motif. In my opinion, this board is worth the small premium over the vanilla version. Just watch out for those top SATA ports.

Pros: Keeps fedex employees busy?

Cons: Will no longer post after 2 months, tried alternate PSU, CPU, Memory. Will not boot, powers on for a couple seconds, then back off in a loop.

Overall Review: Sent it back to MSI, paid shipping, received the board back. They had obviously removed the MOSFET heatsinks... Because they were not torqued down properly when I got the board back. I tightened them... still same problem. Now they are trying to get me to pay to ship it again. Terrible customer service, just gonna replace it with an ASUS.