Pros: easy and extensive bios high ocing capacity
4-way sli capable
dual bios option
dual Ethernet port for less lag

Cons: nothing as of now

Pros: I will say that MSI has great products but the only thing good with this motherboard is that it worked for one day! Beautiful motherboard with all the bells and whistles

Cons: I just got this motherboard a couple weeks ago. I'm not new to building computers so I was a little bummed when I started having issues so early on. The first day after build was great! everything was working fine. On the second day go to start computer everything comes on lights etc no post sounds no video, no keyboard, no mouse working. I did the memory test in just one dimm
still comes on. The blue Cmos light was on no so reset with power off even tried removing Cmos battery nothing. video checked all memory modules made sure they were seated correctly checked all wires and cables to PSU. I swapped out video card with another video card still no video,keyboard,mouse. I changed Sata cables around still the same problem. Really Bummed out!
Debug codes in this order: 04-60-55


My components : Intel i7-5820K LGA 2011V3
Geforce GTX 970 GPU
Ballistix 32GB 4- 8GB DDR4 2400 UDIMM 1.2V CL16
Swiftech H320 X2 water cooling
XFX 1250W PSU
Crucial MX 200 SSD 1TB
Thermaltake 10 GT Case

Other Thoughts: Do your research before buying this board you may have better luck then I did

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Kenneth,
Sorry to hear about the issue you reported. Before considering an RMA can you check following steps below since many reasons can cause the situation like this ,
1. Check and make sure that power are connected firmly, clear CMOS.
2. Check your other major hardware’s (memory, video card, CPU and power supply) to ensure that they are not the cause of the issue.
3. If possible test motherboard outside of the case to eliminate any grounding issue.
4. If you need further assistant, please feel free to contact our technical support department directly at 626.271.1004 from M to F, 9am to 6pm Pacific standard Time.

Thanks for choosing MSI

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: has a lot of nice features to it. 6.3mm headphone jack. M.2 /w NVMe support. Plenty of SATA III connections.
looks great in a windowed case. Love the red/black theme, goes well with MSI GPU theme.
solid overclocking functions. Plenty of features for the user to play around with
plenty of room for expansion with 4 way SLI support.
love the msi BIOs for overclocking. The OC genie feature is great if you want a small boost with no effort.
Built in LED lights look nice, but would have liked to see more of them on the board.

Cons: Had to give it one egg because at this price range $545 I expect much higher quality. The board promises a lot, but under delivers. My first board came with DOA wifi, usb ports working, sata connections working, unable to test M.2 connection or 6.3mm headphone jack (I hope those work). Had to RMA the first board. New board came with working wifi, but some of the built in usb ports are DOA. Tired of doing RMA. Haven't been able to use the pc for a month because of RMA/delivery and troubleshooting with MSI support. Going to keep this board with it's broken usb ports. Have not tried the M.2 connection yet or 6.3mm headphone jack. Controling the LED lights on the board doesn't work. Lights are in the default red which I don't mind because I'm going for a red/black theme anyway. The mystic light app doesn't work properly. Most of the MSI apps are poor quality and do not function as intended. For this price range, the user experience should not be summarized by "I hope it's not broken." At this point it's too late to rebate for me, if I had to choose again I would not buy this board. Buy at your own risk.

Other Thoughts: At $545 this board set me back a lot. For that price I could have purchased 2 boards without all the problems that this one board gave me. I'm probably going to stay away from MSI boards until they improve the quality control issues.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Alex,
Sorry to hear about the issue you reported. MSI use the best components on our products and there is no known issue with the motherboard so it is really strange that you're experiencing issue with more than one motherboards. Before considering another RMA can you check following steps below since many reasons can cause the situation like this ,
1. Check and make sure that power are connected firmly, clear CMOS.
2. Check your other major hardware’s (memory, video card, CPU and power supply) to ensure that they are not the cause of the issue.
3. If possible verify systme outside of the case ensure it's not ground/shorting out.
4. Please feel free to contact our technical support department directly at 626.271.1004 from M to F, 9am to 6pm Pacific standard Time so that we can help find out root cause of your issue.

Thanks for choosing MSI

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: I bought this motherboard and so far I'm just impress. no issues what so ever, and it has delivered on everything it's mentioned. it's running an Intel 5960X with zero issues OC works with out any problems. I just did the standard OC genie and it OC the CPU to 3.8GHz, haven try to go above that yet and CUP's temps are between 32 idle and 43 under load degrees Celsius system temp stay between 34 and 38 degrees . Also it recognized 32GB G_Skill Trident ram and runs at xmp 3200mhz with room for ram OC, so far it's a dream I love this thing. It's a huge jump coming from an AMD System to INTEL.

Cons: zip zip nada

Other Thoughts: Just impressed

Pros: - MSI called me, paid for a shipping label, I sent them my board back and they sent me a brand new motherboard with everything that would normally come in the original box.
- Motherboard and box was in perfect condition
- The board seems to work pretty well
- Came with some MSI goodies, mousepad, lanyard, bottlecap opener thing, MSI bag, couple badges

Cons: - Apparently you can't make a new product review or update an old review if the business responded to it.
(1/14/16 - 1/29/16) Motherboard was installed in computer case, scratches on metal surfaces were visible from outside of the computer case, heat sink on left side of motherboard rattled.
(1/29/16) Got a call from MSI, they were asking how I liked my motherboard, I said didn't like it at all due to the damages of the anesthetics. Now this was a little weird, when I got the call from MSI it kind of appeared they didn't know the situation very well, both me and my father talked to MSI in the two weeks prior, a big packet of documentation was sent to both MSI and Newegg about the situation, but apparently when MSI called and asked for me they wanted me to explain it to them again, it was like this department in MSI got a note saying "call this guy" and that's how that went down. The guy on the phone asked if I wanted to take out my motherboard from my PC and send it back and get a new one, I said yes, so I did that, they got me the shipping label, I sent it to them. MSI also said they'd throw in "some goodies" or something, and they did (I sent an email reminding them cause I think they forgot but in the end they did come). It got kind of confusing from here though...
(1/29/16 - 2/9/16) This period of time was kind of odd. MSI sent me tracking numbers of three packages going to MSI, one of which was my package that eventually came to me after MSI sent it to MSI to send to me, so for like over a week I was wondering why I was looking at tracking numbers of MSI sending packages to itself and in the end I only received one package out of the three packages. I'm not exactly sure why this was setup the way it was, it made things really confusing. When I received the package, it was in a pretty large box, I opened it up, and to my surprise it had absolutely no padding at all, no peanuts, no foam, no nothing, it was just an original motherboard box put inside a large box and shipped that way. The motherboard looked very nice compared to all the previous ones I've gone through.
(2/18/16) Sent an email to Henry Hernandez from MSI (he sent me the shipping label so I had his email), and I said "I was curious if there was anymore packages coming..."- and he replied with "I am sorry we did pass that request to our Marketing to send out a few items. I will check on that but do confirm your shipping address if you can." - And I did that. I think I received the package (a very small crammed box) within the last week or so. I got a few cool items (listed above in Pros).
(3/5/16) Motherboard works great. My father has been overclocking the i7-5960X with it and it appears to be going really well (liquid cooled), I'd say don't mess with OC Genie, it runs really hot if you do. I haven't got to gaming yet on the new PC though, but from the initial benchmarks my father is running it's finally looking like a really nice machine, although I feel a little bit of pain every time I look at the MSI motherboard in the case. This whole process has made me a little bit sad/cautious about purchasing anything from MSI in the future.

Other Thoughts: - I would appreciate it if MSI did not reply to this review.

Pros: Everything about the board flawless. I guess the other reviews .not sure about. But i got 2 and are perfect

Cons: None

Pros: Teak Town dot com has a great review of this board and I agree with most of it. In particular I bought this board primarily for the Killer Network capabilities. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to try that out.

Cons: The board I received had two bad PCIe slots. Of course I didn't find that out until I had already loaded Windows and worked with the BIOS for a while. It took me more that 10 hours of bench time to be sure that the problem was the MB and not something else. I was very disappointed.

This MB has a very sloooooooooooow POST: around 90 seconds from button (PWR) to beep. One of the reasons for the long bench time was this very slow POST. Adding greatly to the annoyance of the slow POST was the absence of a beep. Yeah, no beep. According to the MSI forum, MSI has disabled the beep on POST in the BIOS. People found it annoying. I asked MSI tech support about that, but they never got around to answering that particular question. From a marketing point of view, it is a real head scratcher: if you don't want the beep, just don't install the beeper. If you DO want to hear the beep, jsut don't buy MSI..?? I like the beep especially with a slow POST: it tells me 1. POST succeeded and 2. it's time to act.

Other Thoughts: The POST hung for typically 30 seconds at code 68 and for another 30 seconds at A2. I understand A2. But what is 68?

Tech Support was neither particularly slow nor particularly fast. It got the job done.

One of the reasons I bought this board was that I had great success with the MSI X79 Big Bang XPower II MB. Great board. And if they bring the beep back, MSI can count on me buying another of their MB's.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear David,
Sorry to hear about the issue you reported. Before considering an RMA can you check following steps below since many reasons can cause the situation like this ,
1. Check and make sure that power are connected firmly, clear CMOS.
2. Check your other major hardware’s (memory, video card, CPU and power supply) to ensure that they are not the cause of the issue.
3. If possible do a clean install of window and update BIOS and drivers for best result. www.MSI.com
4. If you need further assistant, please feel free to contact our technical support department directly at 626.271.1004 from M to F, 6am to 6pm Pacific standard Time.

Thanks for choosing MSI

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: I looks great, and feels like quality when you hold it in your hands. The box it comes in is beautiful. The PCI Express slots are nice/sturdy.. the metal finish looks great on all the board 'armor'. Tons of features (well, if it worked).

Cons: 2 bad boards in a row = 1 Egg review.

The first board worked initially, but the Killer NIC Wifi + Bluetooth module was dead on arrival. The module itself was "loose" on the board (I could wiggle it). I didn't really care about Wifi/Bluetooth on a desktop so I ignored it. Everything was fine, until ~ 2 weeks of ownership. Suddenly I booted up and it said my OC had failed (I had set the XMP so my DDR4 would run at the rated speed of 3333). In addition to not being able to run my RAM at the proper speed (there's nothing wrong with the RAM btw), the PC now was unable to locate a boot device by itself. Each time I booted it up, it would tell me it couldn't find a boot device, and that I should insert one and restart. If I manually selected my OS SSD (hit F11 on the initial splash screen and select the boot drive), it worked fine, and would continue to work until I shut it off. The next time I'd try to use it, once again it would fail to find a boot device. The only way to get into Windows was to manually tell it what device to use, every time.

I sent back the first board, and received my new board yesterday. This one is even worse, in that it's basically unusable. The CPU will shoot up to 100 degrees within seconds of booting it up, after which even trying to navigate the BIOS is basically impossible because it's so slow. It randomly sets the CPU to run at 800mhz for no reason. No, my CPU cooler is not broken (it's a brand new GTX H100i from Corsair, works fine). I reseated the CPU 5 times in the socket to make sure I had everything lined up properly, and reapplied thermal paste a few times. One time, during one of my many many reboots, it suddenly "just worked" and ran at a nice 26 degrees. I was able to get into Windows, everything seemed to have magically straightened itself out. Then, as if from nowhere, I get a random BSOD error (too quick to read), after which low and behold, it was back to running at 100 degrees and not working again.

1 bad board I could understand. 2 is unacceptable.

Other Thoughts: Complete lack of quality assurance on the part of MSI. There is no way they're testing these boards. 2 bad boards in a row should be impossible for a $549 motherboard. These things should be getting checked, double checked, then rechecked again at this price point. Instead I've received 2 pieces of unusable junk. I now have no computer until I order yet another board (I will not be ordering any more MSI motherboards. Ever.). Never had any issues from Gigabyte or ASUS. I guess it's time to see what they have to offer.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Joseph,
Sorry to hear about the issue you reported. Since there is no known issue with our motherboard and you have issue with more than one motherboard. Before considering an RMA can you check following steps below since many reasons can cause the situation like this ,
1. Check and make sure that power are connected firmly, clear CMOS.
2. Check your other major hardware’s (memory, video card, CPU and power supply) to ensure that they are not the cause of the issue.
3. If possible do a clean install of window and update BIOS and drivers for best result. www.MSI.com
4. If you need further assistant, please feel free to contact our technical support department directly at 626.271.1004 from M to F, 6am to 6pm Pacific standard Time.

Thanks for choosing MSI

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: Great looks, lots of promise, and.....that about it.

Cons: I have never had it run reliably. Constant reboots, BIOS menu might as well been written in Chinese as it is tedious to navigate, set, and even harder to understand what their stupid settings will even do. Now it has completely hung Up on me (not OC'd since settings make it difficult to), and it keeps alternating between 67, and 04 on the LED debug thingy. To top it off I called their tech support, and all their lines tell me to call Monday to Friday between 6 am to 6pm PST. According to my watch it is 2:30 pm on a Monday, and I reside in an Eastern time zone area. Horrible!

Other Thoughts: Stay away, far, far away from this product and MSI for that matter! Asus was as bad for me before this one, so Gigabyte is my last resort for a motherboard.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Tony,
Sorry to hear about the issue you reported. Our office are closed on the weekend and this past Monday due to holiday "President day". Before considering an RMA can you check following steps below since many reasons can cause the situation like this ,
1. Check and make sure that power are connected firmly, clear CMOS.
2. Check your other major hardware’s (memory, video card, CPU and power supply) to ensure that they are not the cause of the issue.
3. If possible do a clean install of window and update drivers and BIOS for best result. www.MSI.com
4. If you need further assistant, please feel free to contact our technical support department directly at 626.271.1004 from M to F, 6am to 6pm Pacific standard Time.

Thanks for choosing MSI

Best Regards,
MSI Review Team | usreview@msi.com

Pros: I haven't purchased this board yet...I'm waiting for the Carbon flavor G0dlike to hit the shelves at NewEgg.

Cons: Shoddy customer service and multiple RMA mailings only to received garbage motherboards when paying for a brand new, non-flawed item.

Other Thoughts: I'm also paying attention to how MSI customer service is treating current G0dlike customers like Nicholas - (who deserves a brand new board and not a beat up, previously returned, manhandled maybe-repaired unit of someone else's returned problem(s)). Like many potential customers, we all read the reviews on as many sites as possible and then we see how MSI customer service treats existing clients with problems and RMA items. If I see too many issues like the few on this unit in this thread at NewEgg, I will avoid this motherboard like it has the plague. I'm not spending $500 to 700 on a motherboard to invite headaches and problems that won't be promptly addressed in a satisfactory manner. I will instead purchase the top of the line from ASUS or Gigabyte instead. I've enjoyed numerous MSI motherboards in the past, but I will avoid problems whenever possible. So, MSI...get your act together or lose multiple customers just like me.