I have a verified purchase and review over on Newegg for this motherboard that I wanted to share with everyone here that might be considering a purchase....
Pros: -User Friendly UEFI with a ton of customization and options.
-Awesome and very stable overclocking potential.
-Great layout (fan header locations, M.2 slots, etc.)
-Aesthetically pleasing color scheme.
-MSI Utility Software works wonders.
-RGB Lighting Layout.
Cons: -"RGB" Lighting is very limited. Only a set number of colors are available.
-Fan control within the UEFI is spotty.
-Certain portions of the included manual are very vague.
I built my new Kaby Lake gaming PC using this motherboard just recently. Retired my Ivy Bridge i5 3570K and Z77 platform. So far, in gaming and synthetic benchmarks, it's a significant upgrade.
I have this board paired with an Intel i7 7700K, 32gb Corsair Dominator Platinum SE 3200mhz Memory, EVGA GTX 1080 FTW Hybrid, Corsair H115i, Intel 600p 512gb NVMe Drive. Packaging of the motherboard was superb and included everything needed for the build. Everything plugged in and booted into the UEFI flawless the first time. The nice layout with all the fan headers, M.2 slots, SATA ports, etc. made the build that much easier and pleasant. Driver and software installs were seamless and so far everything plays nice together.
I've got the 7700K clocked currently at 4.7ghz, with voltage set to 1.30. I've noticed though that the voltage does not exceed 1.276 at this clock speed under heavy load so there's definitely some room there to overclock even more. A lot of people are getting 5.0ghz out of these i7's with ease.
Aesthetically, this board looks amazing with the carbon/greyish theme. It definitely fits my other hardware choices beautifully.
My only gripes are the following, but certainly not deal breakers:
-The "RGB" lighting options, while they look amazing with the layout MSI chose, you're very limited in your colors. There's only a set number of choices available. If you're trying to fine tune a certain color in, you won't be able to do it. You can get close though.
-Fan control inside the UEFI. I'll admit, I need to mess with it some more, but some of the options I've fiddled with, resulted in some erratic fan speeds. And yes, I am running all 4pin PWM fans in my build. The other downfall is you can only adjust fan speeds based off CPU temps. No option for GPU. I know this is probably asking a lot, but would be awesome if it was available. I know most BIOS options don't have any control over GPU temps unfortunately.
-Manual that ships with the motherboard was vague at times. This might not be a huge deal for some people. Other people on their first time builds might take issue.
All in all, I highly recommend going with this board if you're in the market for a new Kaby Lake build. I've used Gigabyte for years, and I've recently switched over and used MSI for my last couple PC builds now. Everything has been flawless.
Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
---|