Which Z87 Motherboard To Choose? Or MSI Z87-G43 in Enough?

[feelingtheblank]

Hi everyone.

I've upgraded from Core2Duo based system to a i7 4770K last week. And since it's been a very long time from my last upgrade I've made some mistakes i guess and acted a bit hasty.

The mobo I bought is MSI Z87-G43. Since I'm only interested in soft overclocking (like around 4.2-4.3 GHz) I steered for a budget solution here and bought an SSD instead of an expensive mobo. But while doing some deep researches to find some good air cooling solutions & overclocking I've found out that "VRM quality" is very important for the long term stability and durability of the system. I don't know about the quality of my power phases to be honest. There are 7 of those SFC written chokes near the CPU. Also it reads R-47 on the side. So what do these mean? Anyone know about the quality of VRM that used on MSI Z87-G43?

I was actually considering to switch to G45 or G65 in few days but from what I read here Gigabyte Z87X-D3H is really good. I'm not interested in extra SATA controllers (6 slots are more than enough for me) or loads of USB 3 ports. Just want to have a stable&durable board that gives me enough room to overclock when I need. Since probably I won't be able to upgrade to anything for at least for 4 years.

If you guys think that it's better for me to move to a different board I can do this until Friday..

I also noticed that lots of lots of people are suffering from a memory issues on Gigabyte Z87X-D3Hs. Reported issues are about the board is not running stable with 4 DIMM slots occupied. And I couldn't find any information if this problem has fixed.

So what you guys think? Is my MSI z87-g43 is quality enough for a soft overclocking? Or should I switch to a better one before it's too late? Since I need to do it until Friday.

Thanks already for your suggestions and comments. And sorry for my English since I'm not a native speaker.


Best

 

[tweakboy]

Such a nice system. But do not choose MSI. They are the cheapest geforce

try

ASUS or Gigabyte. gl

 

[Adampa1006]

I have the G45 and really like it. I can't imagine it not being good enough for your over clocking desires.

 

[denis280]

Both are good.but my choice would be Gigabyte

 

[DeathReborn]

I myself currently use a MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate while my GigaByte Z87X-OC is off for RMA and while I am running water cooling (H100) on a 4770K it's running happily at 4.4GHz (1.15v) so your board is fine for that kind of OC.

 

[Emulex]

I'm going to try ASUS Z87-plus to work with this old Xeon E3-1225V3 I had laying around. Anyone ever try a haswell xeon with a non-ecc motherboard?

It is listed as workng. I assume you just don't use ECC and it works?

The idea was to build a cheap gaming rig and the only cpu's I had laying around (as in free) were a Xeon E3-1225 V3, I3 3.1ghz (2core/4thread), and a pair of E5-2650V2 (way too much $$$ for a proper mobo to use this cpu).

So I figured the Xeon E3-1225V3 is listed as supported, quad core, no OC, 32gb of ram (or 16gb) and a decent video card like the Grid K2 or Quadro 4000/6000/GTX 470 or any combo of the above. I'm not sure which i'm going to do probably the GTX 470 for simple gaming.

The Intel C222/c224/C226 mobo's cost too much money and quite honestly for the speed difference, I have full servers with L5639 westmere loaded already that cost $300 or less with cpu/ram/raid. So it's partially being cheap and wanting to make something that will work.

Xeon E3-1225V3 + GTX 470 + Asus Z87-plus + ?? Ecc/Non-ECC Ram = win??

Been a while since I've built my own systems, it's been cheaper to buy machines off demo an tweak them to specification rather than mucking about with white-boxing it!

lmk your thoughts. I know the I7 haswell would be a better choice , overclocking etc, but we're talking this cpu was sitting on my desk, free, and quad core seems like a solid platform to build off these days versus dual core