I have used MSI motherboards almost exclusively for many years of building PCs for myself, friends, and family. They make rock solid products that last for many, many years of typical use. My first one, supporting a pentium D processor from over 12 years ago still works (not in use, but it still boots). Anyway, this board packs a ton of modern features in at a very reasonable price point. RGB and aRGB ports, USB 3 headers (note: no USB 3.1 gen 2 front panel connector for a type-c port), high quality audio capacitors and dedicated headphone amp, multiple high power usb 3.1 ports, includes intel brand wireless AC and bluetooth card. Everything you could want/ask for, it has it. This is in my new personal build, made Nov 2018.
So why 4 stars and not 5? MSI Mystic Light software is absolute garbage. Granted, I will preface this by saying that none of the aRGB control software out there right now are 'great', they all have their own issues, bugs, problems, and lack of customization options. iCUE currently leads the pack, by far, but it still has plenty of issues and crashes on me frequently. I still firmly believe that anyone tech savvy is still currently much better off using an arduino and a free library to control their aRGB lights than any of the company's out there making 'plug-and-play' solutions.
So, mystic light software:
-Interface is not intuitive at all, nothing is labeled correctly, there are no hover-over help texts, and there is no real user manual for how it is supposed to work, so you are just kind of clicking on stuff, looking at your computer, clicking on stuff, seeing what changed, etc. to try and figure out what's going on.
-The software is so slow that you routinely find yourself wondering if it crashed or not. You can click on something and it can take between 2 and 8 seconds to respond, if it responds at all.
-It crashes regularly, from normal use, from trying to click things to quickly, from trying what I'm guessing are unintended combinations of settings...
-Motherboard lights, including some above the RAM, quite a few on the back side of the board along the right side, and the logo over the chipset and i/o, is one 'section' that you can select in the software. Under that, you are presented with a list of lights that includes 'all', 'RAM<1-4>', and then 'LED<1-36>' or so. There is no distinction as to what LED is where, so it is blind trial and error. So you pick what you want to control, then what? That's a great question, because there really isn't any kind of explanation as to how to customize it. There is a bar of 5 lights that goes back and forth on the other side of the interface that is apparently how you are supposed to customize it. Why are there 5 lights? No idea. What do each of them do? No idea, it seems like it just updates the LED(s) to be whatever color of the 5 that you most recently changed. It doesn't cycle between them, there isn't any kind of pattern...
-The GPU, also MSI, has an RGB logo on it, that you can't control through the software. You click on GPU on the main page of the interface and...nothing happens. There is no apparent way to change the color of that LED, and there is no way to individually turn it on or off.
-So, ultimately, you can leave it as the default rainbow, at a fixed pace and pattern that cannot apparently be changed, or you can set each LED to a single, static color, or you can turn everything off completely. That's it. And to turn the GPU or the RAM lights off, you have to turn everything off.
As someone who designs GUIs for a living, this software is just an unmitigated disaster, and MSI should be ashamed of themselves for promoting such a garbage product so heavily. So my computer has nice aRGB fans hooked up to a corsair lighting node run by iCUE, and the rest of the RGBs in my computer (GPU, Mobo, RAM) are all just off, because it's not worth the headache of trying to figure out how to make it work.
| Processor | pentium |
|---|---|
| RAM | DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 4000 |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
