Z97 Gaming 5

$160 MSI

MSI’s gamer-centric take on the Z97 chipset ought to be a clear favorite. It’s around the same price as the more generalist Asus Z97-A, but comes with extra enthusiast-class features, such as voltage check points and an LED debug display.

The problem is that it’s bottom of the class in the Rome II gaming benchmark. Only by a couple of frames per second, but when the competition is tightly packed around some slightly better figures that’s a significant result. Especially for a board with ‘gaming’ in its title.

The stock CPU performance is similarly off the pace. The multithreaded performance of the 4770K is weaker even than it is in the ASRock mini-ITX board at its stock clockspeeds. Which makes the subsequent overclocking anomaly seem even odder: while the MSI was only capable of stable operation at 4.6GHz it actually benchmarked almost on par with the Z97-A at 4.7GHz. If you do end up with an MSI Gaming 5 then you really want to overclock it.

The storage performance is impressive too: some of the fastest sequential numbers in the test, and it has an M.2 socket for next-gen storage. But while the overclocking and storage is good I can’t look past the gaming performance: that’s surely this board’s raison d’etre.