This motherboard is of course designed to work with Intel’s 4th Generation of processors – Haswell. The socket is LGA1150 but has the mounting holes for LGA115X so if you have a cooler that has been used on another socket such as LGA1155 then it will work fine here too. MSI have also included dual fan headers for the CPU cooler just beside the top heatsink which is very handy for coolers which use dual fan configurations.
MPOWER MAX makes use of a 20 Phase DigitALL Power Design which is ideal for substantial overclocking and LN2 usage. Covering the MOSFETs is a sleek heatsink which is more than capable of alleviating heat whilst under load.
Capable of sizeable overclocks
MPOWER MAX has support for dual channel DDR3. MSI specify there is up to 64GB compatibility and XMP support. The follows frequencies are compatible: 1066/1333/1600/1866*/2000*/2133*/2200*/2400*/2600*/2666*/2800*/3000*(OC).
Also in this region are the voltage-check points for advanced users to take advantage of. Real-time voltages can be obtained when used with the provided cables and a multi-metre.
Dual channel DDR3 slots
Our motherboard also has storage completely covered with eight SATA 3 (6GB/s) ports which are all supplied by the Intel Z87 chip situated behind the ports. MSI have also given MPOWER MAX dual USB 3.0 ports which is great to see!
Plenty of storage options and dual USB 3.0 ports
At the bottom of MPOWER MAX MSI have placed an LED debug panel for helpful diagnostic purposes and a fast boot button to boot straight into BIOS without having to hit the “DEL” button. Since our motherboard has a dual BIOS (Multi BIOS II), there is a switch in this region too which you can choose to jump to two different BIOS.
Behind the SATA ports and these features sits the large Intel Z87 heatsink.
Useful features at the bottom of the motherboard
