A mid-range board at a budget price
MSi’s G45 may have a $118 price tag now,
but it hasn’t always been a budget board - the introduction of a new version of
the board with an added Thunderbolt port (the cunningly titled Z77A-G45
Thunderbolt) means that retailers have slashed the price of the old’ G45 stock.
This is good news for bargain hunters, as you’re effectively looking at
mid-range motherboard for a rock-bottom price - news that’s likely to have our
current favorite budget Z77 board, the Gigabyte Z77-D3H, looking nervously over
its shoulder.
MSI
Z77A-G45
It’s clear that the G45 isn’t a budget
board when you open the box too, especially when compared with MSI’s budget
Z77A-G43 (see Issue 106, p74). The SATA ports and on-board USB 3 header, for
example, are of the preferred, but more expensive, edge-mounted, parallel
variety, making for neater cabling.
The VRM heat sinks are beefy too, a
distinct contrast to the Gigabyte D3H, which only had a heat sink on one of its
two banks of VRMs. Nestled under these rugged-looking heat sinks is MSI’s now familiar
Military Class III VRM hardware, which includes efficient Hi-C capacitors and
Dr MOSII MOSFETS, which should help to keep down temperatures when
overclocking.
A further important difference between the
G43 and G45 is the expansion slot setup, which is much better on the G45. as it
ditches the old PCI slots (of which the G43 had three) in favor of extra PC I -
E16x and 1 x slots - sure, PC I slots can still be handy now and then if you
have an old sound card or TV card, but three of them are wasted on a Z77 board.
With the inclusion of voltage-checking
points, the G45’sdesign is clearly focused on overclocking
What you can do with these slots is also
improved, as the G45 has SLI support via its two upper 16x PCI-E 3 slots; a
feature that was again lacking on the G43. You even get a voltage measuring
strip on the G45; it’s a largely useless inclusion for most users, but it hints
at the overclocking-focused design of the board.
With
the inclusion of voltage-checking points the G45s design is clearly focused on
overclocking
Crucially, all SLI support, parallel SATA
ports and chunky heat sinks are also missing from the Gigabyte D3H, making the
MSI board look like very tough competition for our current favorite budget
board.
Happily for MSI, the features rout
continues with the rear I/O connections too, as the G45 is much better
specified than the G43 or D3H. It has a clear-CMOS button here for a start,
which is a godsend if you’re overclocking while the board is cooped up in a
case, and also bundles a coaxial S/P-DIF-output, a feature that’s again absent
from the G43 and D3H. Aside from that, it’s business as usual, with HDMI, DVI
and VGA connections, analogue surround-sound audio ports and six USB ports
(though, disappointingly, only two of these are USB 3).
It’s
business as usual, with HDMI, DVI and VGA connections, analogue surround-sound
audio ports and six USB ports
Performance
Naturally, the specs list is only half the
story, so we mounted the G45 on one of our test benches and set about finding
out if its performance lived up to expectations. Pleasingly, we saw a strong
start when it posted a video encoding test score of 3,225. This compared favor ably
with the 3,192 scored by the identically priced D3H. These roles reversed in
the other two tests in our Media Benchmarks, however, giving the Gigabyte board
a (very) narrow victory with 2,224 points compared to the MSI’s 2,220. The two
boards also proved to be equals in our gaming test, with Shogun 2: Total War,
returning identical results.
With the honors even, we turned our
attention to the G45’s EFI, to see what extra performance we could eke out of
the board. We’re fans of MSI’s new Click BIOS (despite the fact that it should
really be called Click EFI, but that’s probably one for Pedants’ Paradise),
which lays out lots of useful information (such as the CPU temperature, clock
speed and boot priority list) in a very easy, concise way.
This information is always visible too,
with only the options in the bottom two-thirds of the screen changing, depending
on which of the side panels you’ve selected. It’s an elegant system, and
substantially more interesting to use than the uninventive looks just like a BIOS
EFIs of other manufacturers. Importantly, all the overclocking options are also
clustered together in a single menu.
Setting the CPU Vcore Voltage to 1,35V was
all that was needed to stabilize our standard 4.8GHz overclock. At this speed,
the G45 sailed through our tests, romping home to an overall benchmark score of
2,800-marginally ahead of the overclocked D3Hand within a stone’s throw of more
expensive boards, such as the Asus Maximus GeneV.
Performance in Shogun 2 also saw a healthy
jump after overclocking, but not by a distinguishable margin both the G45and
D3H returned a minimum of 34 fps.
These
chunky heat sinks hint at the mid-range nature of the G45, and provide
stability when overclocking too
Conclusion
Based on its performance and feature set,
we’ve no hesitation in Lauding the Z77A-G45 - it’s an excellent board that
makes its competitors Look tragically poorly specced, thanks to its mid-range
DNA.
There are other factors to consider,
however, as the LGA1155 socket is pretty Long in the tooth now Indeed, those in
the know will be Looking towards the horizon at Intel’s fast-approaching
Haswell-based processors, which are destined to use its new LGA1150 socket.
The Lack of a dear upgrade path is the
G45’s only major weakness. If this isn’t a concern for you then this is the
best Z77 board we’ve seen for the money.
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Info
§ Price:
$118
§ Manufacturer:
www.msi.com
§ SKU
number: Z77A-G45
In Detail
§ Chipset:
lntelZ77
§ CPU
support: LGA1155 Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, Pentium and Celeron
§ Memory
support: 4slots: max32CBDDR3 (2,667MHz]
§ Expansion
slots: 2 x 16x PCI-E3slots(one16xortwo 8x], 1 x16xPCI-E2slot (4x speed only],
4xPCI-E1x slots
§ Sound:
HD Audio via Realtek ALC892
§ Networking:
Realtek8111E 1 Gb/sec
§ Overclocking:
CPU clock 1-655MHz, CPU multiplier16-63; max voltages, CPU 1.52V, RAM 2.46V,
PLL2.43V, CPU I/O 1.55V
§ Ports:
2xSATA3Gbps,4x SATA6Gbps, 1 xPS/2,4x USB3,10xUSB, LAN,4x surround audio out,
line in, mic, optical S/PDIF out, coaxialS/PDIF out, DVi, D-sub, HDMI
§ Dimensions
(mm): 305x 245 (ATX)
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