To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

MSI Z87-G43 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £79
inc VAT

A superb LGA1150 motherboard for under £80 with great performance and plenty of expansion ports

Specifications

LGA1150, ATX, Intel Z87 chipset, supports: 4th generation Intel Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7

http://www.ebuyer.com

The MSI Z87-G43 is an ATX LGA1150 motherboard for Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell Core, Pentium and Celeron processors. It uses the Z87 chipset and comes with plenty of features to form a superb foundation for a new Haswell-based PC.

MSI Z87-G43

Its sensible layout makes it very easy to build on and you’ll find a good selection of expansion slots for installing additional cards. There are two PCI-E x16 slots, with the first running at the full bandwidth and conforming to the faster PCI Express 3.0 standard. This should be the slot you use when installing a single graphics card. If you’d like to run dual graphics cards, the motherboard supports AMD’s CrossFireX standard, although the second PCI-E x16 slot only runs at x4 speed. For further expansion there are two PCI-E x1 slots and three PCI slots.

MSI Z87-G43

We were particularly pleased with the Z87-G43’s performance. When we ran our multimedia benchmarks with an Intel Core i5-4670K and 4GB of DDR3 RA running at 1,600MHz, it scored a fantastic 116 overall, which is four points ahead of our reference score. This is superb for an £80 board, making it one of the most powerful motherboards we’ve tested in recent months. If you do want to overclock your processor, though, doing so is easy thanks to its user-friendly UEFI BIOS.

Its four DDR3 memory slots also let you get the best out of your system, as they can also support a huge 64GB of RAM at maximum default speeds of 1,600MHz, or 3,000MHz when overclocked. Likewise, its six SATA3 ports will ensure that all your drives will be able to perform at the fastest speeds available.

Pages: 1 2

Basic Specifications

Rating****
Processor socketLGA1150
Form factorATX
Size244x305mm
Processor support4th generation Intel Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7
Processor external bus100MHz
Chipset north bridgeIntel Z87
Chipset south bridgeIntel Z87
Passively-cooled north bridgeyes
Integrated graphicsNo
Supported memory typeDDR3
Maximum memory speedPC3-24000
Memory slots4
Maximum memory64GB
Dual-channel supportyes

Buying Information

Price£79
Supplierhttp://www.ebuyer.com
Detailswww.msi.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots2
Dual graphics architectureCrossFireX
PCI-E x4 slots0
PCI-E x1 slots2
PCI slots3
Fan headers5
Floppy ports0
IDE ports0
Serial ATA ports0
RAID chipset (max disks)Intel Z87 (RAID 0, 1, 5, 10)

Features

Wired network ports1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports)Realtek ALC892 (6x analogue out)
USB2 ports / headers8/6
Firewire ports / headers0/0
Legacy ports1x PS/2, parallel header, serial header
Other portsVGA, DVI, HDMI
Cables included2x SATA
Brackets includednone
Software includednone

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustmentCPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment300MHz

Read more

Reviews