Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsDoes exactly what's needed for a great price... Solid performer from a Solid company!
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2017
It worked straight out of the box! NVMe support. If you know your way around a computer it's pretty much a plug an play Motherboard.
Couple of things I do want to point out. My board came with 2 bent pins on the CPU Slot with some careful twizzering I was able to bend them back to correction. 2nd Item the Case Connects (HDDLED, power switch etc... Are not labeled... Given this is a Z270 and it's 2017 I expected them to be. I also want to point out something that MSI nor the Manual discuss and that is your Transfer rates on NVmE drives. This was a particular problem for me and took some searching as this is what I believe is a major flaw. This board has 28 Lanes... You get 16x right off the top when your using a 16x PCIe Video card... Leaving you with 12 Lanes remaining. This board does not have a dedicated lane for PCIe NVMe drives ( m.2 Drives). I had to move my M.2 drive from port 1 to port to in order to get 4x transfer rate. If you don't your stuck @ 1x which is a huge bottleneck as most of you are aware. There are no specific settings to tell which port uses which lanes only a spot that distinguishes "generation per lane" forcing Gen3 does not change transfer speed. You have to swap ports. This could be a very bad set back if you where to purchase 2 NVme Drives and Raid them your transfer rates would be cut in half. Because of this I have deduced 1 Star... I read the manual back to front word for word there is nothing in the manual regarding this issue. If you do choose to Raid... This board has BIOS RAID built in driver support... no preloading drivers necessary.
I've built 50+ computers and about every 4th board I come across somehow blocks the SATA cables. There are Horizontal SATA cables and there are vertical SATA cable connections. This board has both in case you have right angle cables.
