The MPower may be the handsomest motherboard ever to grace Damage Labs with its presence. I’ve gotta admit, some of the perks are nice, not least of which is the look of the board itself. The Z97 MPower is part of MSI’s overclocking-centric motherboard series, and you’ll pay a bit more to get its suite of extra-fancy features. At $185 online, this is the sort of high-end board that, frankly, we’ve kind of avoided at times here at TR, simply because we’re ridiculously frugal and tend to focus our reviews on cheaper boards where possible. I was happy to see the Z97 MPower make its way into Damage Labs. The markings on the CPU’s metal cap indicate a final product, but for all I know, MSI went through a big stack of 4790K chips and sent only the most frequency-friendly examples to guys like me. Perhaps I should have mentioned that to them. I was somehow expecting a retail boxed processor, with the ain’t-been-opened stickers still intact. Heck, I didn’t expect this, but MSI shipped the Core i7-4790K to us in the box with the Z97 MPower motherboard, covered in nothing but bubble wrap. Whether or not our results will track with your own, should you buy a 4790K, is pretty much anyone’s guess. We’re just looking at a single sample of a retail Core i7-4790K, so we’re not exactly doing science to this thing. You can overclock it and see how it goes. That’s why I was particularly receptive when the folks at MSI extended a tantalizing offer: let us send you a retail version of the Core i7-4790K along with one of our fancy Z97 MPower motherboards. There is, of course, one simple way to find out. Maybe there would be something different about the chips that hit store shelves. My great hope and expectation is that whatever chip we’re reviewing is pretty well representative of what people will be buying soon.īut whatever. I’ve gotta say, as a reviewer, I’m not fond of that entire concept. Then, frustratingly, we heard whispers from one vocal Intel employee who suggested that final, production versions of Devil’s Canyon might perform better. We liked other things about Devil’s Canyon, such as the 4790K’s higher stock clock speeds at the same price as the 4770K, but its overclocking prowess just didn’t impress. Many others in the press saw similar results. Intel had pitched these new processors as especially good for high clock speeds, thanks to some changes to the heat-transfer and power-delivery bits in the CPU package, but we couldn’t get our Core i7-4790K review sample to run any faster than a regular Haswell-based 4770K. Our first attempt at overclocking one of Intel’s new “Devil’s Canyon” processors was, frankly, a little bit underwhelming.
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