MSI Z87-G43 review

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.

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.

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.