For those who?ve been closely following the Z97 launch these past couple weeks, you'll know that it hasn't been anywhere near the smoothest chipset launch in Intel history. Despite Intel's NDA set for May 11, we?ve literally known practically everything about Z97 for months and almost every motherboard maker has been either leaking their own products or breaking some sort of NDA to get their products some early media coverage.

With Intel's NDA now expired and Z97 chipset based motherboards now rolling out at major retailers (with Intel's new Haswell Refresh CPUs following suit), today we'll be reviewing our first Z97 motherboard, the MSI Z97 Gaming 7.