MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) M.2 USB 3.1 Gen 2 DDR4 HDMI DP Wi-Fi SLI CFX ATX Z390 Gaming Motherboard

I bought this motherboard round about a month ago, and it’s working great! I highly recommend it for anyone who needs a quality motherboard with good specs, easy installation, and ease of use.SPECS:This motherboard is a brand-new board using the LGA1151 socket, great for new 9 series Intel processors. The other specs are held in the page above, and I don’t feel like copying them here. It also has built in Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth, all of which work flawlessly. Don’t buy a separate card if you get this motherboard. On-board communication between parts is fast enough that it will never be the bottleneck in your system.BUILD QUALITY:This motherboard is excellently built, with a nice, solid feel to it. I’ve handled boards before that feel like they’ll break in your hands, but this one felt solid and build well. There are of course some plastic pieces, but those felt nice as well, and looked good. The PCIe ports were reinforced and will hold even heavy graphics cards.INSTALLATION:Motherboards are never easy to install- if you’re looking for one here, you obviously understand that. This wasn’t worse than any I’ve done before, and it has nine holes to allow you to mount it solidly to the interior of your case. There is also a nice CD that comes along with it to install drivers and other utilities. This installer crashed three times before I could get everything and contains a bit of bloatware (that you can opt out of), but it installs drivers that Windows will install by itself and utilities that only gamers will want.AESTHETICS:This motherboard looks pretty nice. It’s black, but you can see that from the picture. One thing I didn’t realize until I plugged it in is that it has some LEDs on the bottom of it! They’re not in the most useful place, being on the back side of the board, but if you have a clear case, I’m sure it’s fine. This motherboard also supports RGB on many components and has a nice control panel for such that can be installed.BIOS:MSI put a lot of effort into their BIOS to make it look futuristic and appeal to gamers. You probably won’t need to use it much unless you’re into overclocking (although this can be done with their DragonCenter utility), but if you do have to, it looks pretty good, has tons more options that you’ll ever need, and is remarkably stable.I/OThis motherboard has lots of ports out the back, many of which you won’t need because they’re on the back and supports lots of stuff for the front. The front maxes out at eight active USB ports, depending on the internal connectors.MISCELLANEOUS:I’ve had problems with motherboards not knowing how to wake up properly from sleep. This motherboard does not have that problem. I appreciate that. This board supports water cooling. Also, the dragons are cool.All in all, this is an excellent motherboard for anyone who needs a 9 series Intel CPU and excellent functionality.

As an experienced PC builder and computer professional, I have seen very very few DOA MOBOs. This is the first MSI Z390 board I have tried. And the first MSI I have picked up in a few years. I have been using ASUS lately. In any case, this board arrived and seemed DOA. It would not even bring up the 12V on the PSU. MSI phone support initially had no clue, because it was going into an existing chassis with working everything. After about 30 min of just check everything troubleshooting we found a power supply cable that was not used in the old system even though it was connected was mis-wired in the connector from the power supply. It has been that way for a few years not causing any issue until the new MOBO (actually used it). What a weird problem. In any case, What we originally thought was a bad board turned out to be a bad connector from the power supply. In any case, the MOBO is up and running great. The setup was easy. Beware on larger fan coolers, they may interfere with some of the components on the board. I used a DEEPCOOL Neptwin RGB CPU Cooler 6 and had to pull off one of the fans to get it to fit. AIO should be no problem. Also, the spreader plate on the DEEPCOOL touched the through hole leads on some of the caps. It has a plastic insulator, but I don't trust these from experience. They wear through from micro vibrations over time and short. I managed to bend the arms that were interfering as they are not needed for the 1151 socket. This is a common issue with these all socket in one type mountings. The LED firmware and BIOS needed to be updated before the LED's would work correctly but once set up, they look awesome. Case fit was good, no issues. Instructions were concise and well written. BIOS setup was a piece of cake. Overall, a great board for the money. Only using one long video card 1070 and it fits fine. M.2 slots not used but look very accessible. Audio seems adequate without any noticeable background noise.