What it does is to basically increase the priority flags of gaming packets to ensure a faster and lag-free experience. The chip is built and readied for gaming purposes and it fits with the board’s target market. One of the foremost features of this board is the support of the Killer Lan NIC, namely the E2200. Though, traditional gamer in this country would not be needing any of those buttons. But overall, we can say that the overall workspace is cleaner and less cluttered compared to its predecessor. What turned us off was the absence of on-board buttons, namely the basic ones such as power and reset, prompting us to jump the board.

There’s nothing much to tell about the general layout of the board aside from the minor tweaks. On the opposite side of the board, the onboard Realtek ALC1150, configured to work with MSI’s Audio Boost 2 feature. On the lower right side, the Z97 Gaming 5 has 6 x SATA 6 Gb/s ports and a socket for USB 3.0. The heatsink for the PCH has also been updated to have a cleaner look. For memory slots, the board is home to four DIMM slots with each having 2 clips for security on the upper right. The socket is located just below the CPU and beside a PCIE 2.0 x 4 slot. Probably the main addition to this board is the M.2 support.

Msi z97 gaming 7 cmos battery