Z87 XPower Firmware
MSI still relies on its tried-and-true firmware GUI with oversized clock and buttons to offset smaller-font settings, but at least that font can be read after shrinking screenshots to fit this Web page. Its OC menu starts off with CPU base clock and quickly progresses to CPU and DRAM ratios.
Voltage settings are further down the menu. We were able to run our Core i7-4770K at 4.60 GHz without thermal throttling by using the board’s 1.230 V setting to reach an actual 1.25 V.
DRAM similarly reached 1.65 V at the board’s 1.63 V setting, though it could only push our DDR3-3000 kit to a 2965 MT/s data rate at full stability. DDR3-3000 mode wasn’t even bootable, though the Z87 XPower did recognize the CPU’s maximum multiplier and choose the appropriate 102.3 MHz base clock to reach its full rating.
Primary, secondary, and tertiary memory timings are all adjustable, as is on-die termination.
MSI’s DRAM Training menu lets you change the way the memory controller interacts with memory modules. MSI hasn’t written a tutorial, but there is a possibility that a few tweaks here might have gotten our modules over the hump to their rated 3000 MT/s data rate.
The DigitALL Power submenu provides many voltage offset and droop compensation controls, none of which needed to be altered for our air-cooled tests. Extreme overclockers will probably find this menu most useful.
Other related menus include a visual map of detected component locations, several pages of SPD and XMP timing detection reports, a page to store up to eight overclocking configurations as user profiles, and even a manually-adjustable fan ramp map.
