MSI Z87M-G43 LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI USB 3.0 uATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: i have had this board for nearly 3 months now,and i have had zero problems with it,i got it to replace a DOA gigabyte motherboard,and it worked right away with no problems,it had no bent pins so that's a plus,honestly for the price it's a amazing buy,i don't know why this only has three eggs on newegg,but for the price you cant really do much better,overall i would recommend this z87 motherboards to my friends and to anyone looking for a budget motherboard.

forgot to add that the bios is really good,it's better then most UEFI bios i have seen,and the OC genie function is really nice if you just want a simple overclock to 4.0GHZ

Cons: no cons,everything works as it should and for a great price you cant go wrong

Overall Review: None

Pros: Once you have the right arrangement of hardware it's okay.

Cons: As another reviewer pointed out it's unstable, especially when it comes to your memory selection. I first tried CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 16GB (CMY16GX3M2A1866C9R) and the system wouldn't even post.

I swapped that out with my previous rig's memory and the system was fine, so I looked on MSI's website for compatible memory and went with G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 16GB (F3-12800CL9Q-16GBZL), thinking that the system might not like 1866 memory or 8GB modules. With this memory the system seemed fine, until intensive gaming at which point the system randomly BSODed. I basically had no idea if this was a Windows 8 issue or another hardware component (it was my first rig with an SSD). So I tried Windows 7, and also put various components in my old rig to see if they were the issue. When I'd pretty much exhausted testing all the components I concluded it was the motherboard.

Eventually I was about to give up on the motherboard so I looked at the other Z87 uATX boards, and on one of the Gigabyte ones the reviewer mentioned that it wasn't stable when 4 sticks of memory were installed. I removed one set of DIMMs, and sure enough the system was stable. So I think there might be something wrong with uATX Z87 motherboards in general when it comes to having 4 DIMMs installed.

Really wanting 16GB, for whatever reason, I got G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series (16GB F3-1600C9D-16GXM), this time looking at G Skill's website to verify that they had been tested with this board. Finally I have a stable system with 16GB of memory.

Overall Review: It's not fun when your you build a new gaming rig and it won't post. I've always had good experiences with MSI in the past, so this was kind of surprising. Once you have the right combination of components installed, though, its perfectly fine. There isn't much selection when it comes to uATX Z87 boards so this is probably as good a bet as any.

G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB
XFX Double D FX797GTDFC Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB
Intel Core i7-4770K