Z87 MPower Max Firmware
The Z87 MPower Max comes with the exact software suite and tuning application as its previously-reviewed sibling. Rather than repeat our analysis of those tools and utilities, we'll move on to the board’s firmware specifics.
MSI’s Base Clock setting has a few peculiarities, defaulting, for example, to 99.77 MHz with a 100 MHz setting and reaching exactly 100 MHz at a 100.01 MHz setting.
We only got 4.45 GHz from our CPU sample, though core voltage likely played a part. Our target 1.25 V wasn’t achievable, but a 1.238 V setting delivered 1.249 V at low loads and 1.266 V at high loads. Increasing the voltage setting allowed CPU voltage to climb past 1.27 V, which in turn caused our CPU to throttle when running eight threads in an AVX-optimized version of Prime95.
DRAM voltage was a little more compliant, delivering 1.650 to 1.656 V using the board’s 1.635 V setting. The Z87 MPower Max gave us a maximum stable DDR3-2965 data rate from our DDR3-3000 test sample.
The Z87 MPower Max provides several advanced memory bus controls in addition to primary, secondary, and tertiary timings.
Additional voltage regulator controls are found within the Z87 MPower Max “DigitALL Power” menu.
