Amazon.com: Customer reviews: MSI Enthuastic Gaming Intel Z170A LGA 1151 DDR4 USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard (Z170A Gaming M7)

Good motherboard and it has been really easy to use since I got it

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2018

I received this with no issues. The issue that I had was on my part where I accidentally tried to use an 1150 processor on an 1151 without paying attention. I bent the pins and contacted MSI to get it repaired, they replaced the board for me and gave me up to date serial information. They were fast to mail me a new one.

I installed a I7-6700K - 4 thread - 8 core processor and it has been working flawlessly since I bought it. I transitioned out of my standable HP desktop and moved the drives over that had Windows 10 already installed. I have 4x8GB DDR4 Corsair DIMM 2333MHz sticks installed, and I have no issues there. I am using a Corsair H100i v2 and have 4 fans installed, 2 on the radiator and one in the back and front, and the case stays between 30-35C idled and 40-43C in game. The case stays cool. I have a 1060 6GB VR ready as my main card, and an radeon 360 as my secondary.

I installed a USB PCI x16 card in that has USB 3.0 compatibility so I can never run out of USB slots, and all my hardware is powered by a 1000w supply. It stays really cool, is completely stable. I got an SSD when I was upgrading and moved over my Windows image, and now the boot time versus my HDD is incredible. Takes about 10 seconds to load now versus waiting 45 seconds.

All my games run between 60-120fps. Read and Write speeds are as expected with my HDDs. I cannot wait to get M2s and try them out.

All and all, this motherboard has served its purpose for the past two years, and I can see it going another 5 years.

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Sean Kopinski

This is a great motherboard for when you are on a budget

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

MSI.... They keep on impressing me with their build quality, performance, and aesthetics! This is a great motherboard for when you are on a budget, albeit not a super tight budget. The Z170A is the perfect option for those gamers, myself included, who don't need a $5,000 rig but still want similar performance. MSI is one of the best companies in the game. They have incredible customer service, some of the best build quality, and some of the best performance, hands down. I will say, this motherboard will last me a LONG time, especially with the 32 GB of Ram and my Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming graphics card holds it's own for what I need. Excellent motherboard for the money.

8 people found this helpful

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Jim

Perfection!

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2016

Verified Purchase

This has to be to this date the best amazon purchase I have ever made. At first I was gonna by the gigabyte gaming 7 motherboard and I took that leap of faith and got the missing gaming seven and wow. MSI never ceases to amaze me this runs beautifuly and has many more trinkets and gadgets to it than what is posted. Not only does it look amazing but it works amazingly. The one problem I could find tho probably isn't even there fault it is mine. My radiator for my liquid cooling loop does not fit in my case without alittle squeezing and pushing but otherwise this thing is amazing and in my opinion is perfect

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Daniel

The board is pretty good with a lot of good features

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2016

Verified Purchase

The board is pretty good with a lot of good features, but when it arrived there was a free screw and nut in the anti static back with the board. Furthermore a few back panel ports don't work.

All the USB ports seem to work, but the LAN port and the S/PDIF connection definitely do not. Fortunately I was able to add a sound and network card that do work. The rest are a toss up, but I didn't test them as I don't normally make much use of them.

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SRS_K

This One Goes to 11

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

Aesthetically speaking this board is what we've all come to expect from MSI, it's clean and a little more "grown up" than previous iterations on the Z97 chipset. Like some other premium Z170 boards this one does include some accent lighting, however here it's all red with no ability to change the color. Fine as far as I'm concerned, green would look tacky and weird with this black and red setup. Which brings me to the one real complaint I have, the Post Code Read Out panel and the Power/Reset buttons on the board have bright green LEDs which completely clash with the look. I've included a picture to illustrate what I mean. Also, I guess if I'm really looking for things to complain about I'd like to see an Intel NIC option included at this price point. The Killer NIC and software suite is fine for some people, but for my needs ends up being more trouble than it's worth. Now, with the bad out of the way let's talk features...

Features wise, this board comes with a lot. Audio is great, I use Superlux HD668Bs and find the board delivering clean audio to the rear, personally I'm not a fan of front side audio in general. Especially with the orientation of my case. But I've found myself being perfectly fine plugging into the motherboard rather than a DAC. There are 2 M.2 slots (supports PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA 6GB/s standards 4.2cm/6cm/8cm lengths), according to the User Guide pp 34-36 will run at x2 speed when PCI devices are installed. However, there doesn't seem to be any effect from the PCIe slots at all, and since there are actually 4 PCI slots you should have no trouble installing something like say an Intel NIC and still having access to the M.2 slots at full speed. This will limit the amount of SATA access you have, but if you need all 6 sata slots, both M.2 slots, and the PCI slots simultaneously, you likely would do better with a Workstation grade board anyway.

Click Bios 5 is slick, but not much different from 4. Clean and easy to use, the overclocking dial "Game Boost" is easy to use. I would still recommend overclocking from software rather than the board itself however. There is a pop up that will show you what settings will be changed with the overclocking presets, a word of caution however these presets DO actually change the base clock. Which is important to keep in mind if you've already overclocking your video card. My system managed a 4.8 on a 6700k, but I dropped it down to a 4.6 due to stability issues with my video OC. Definitely loads of potential here for anyone looking to push their gear.

8 people found this helpful

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Anthony

The next board I received fared better in the beginning and was able to post upon ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2016

Verified Purchase

I received this board about nine days ago and it has simply been a nightmare install. To preface, I have been building computers for over 10 years and have only had to RMA one board in that time frame. I am about to RMA this board for the second time.

The first board I received never was able to post. I kept receiving the D0 error and tried everything possible to correct the issue but was unable to fix it. I requested a return to Amazon which was handled flawlessly by them as always. The next board I received fared better in the beginning and was able to post upon initial install. Since then it has been issue after issue.

First issue stemmed from reboots. Occassionally when a reboot was needed for different software installs or updates the board would boot into some crazy resolution that my monitor was unable to display. A simple fix would be to reboot again until the display was fine. I figured a driver update or clean OS install would correct it but no dice. I figured this was a minor inconvenience and settled with it.

The next issue began with the audio. I thought I was having driver issues with my board which was partly correct. I had to reinstall some drivers after they failed to install correctly off of the supplied motherboard disc. Now that I am receiving audio I come to find that I can only get sound out of one port and the cable needs to be wiggled to hear out of both speakers. These speakers work fine on other devices and have been tested several times.

Now I am sitting here with a $200.00, partially working motherboard debating if it's worth the return process seeing as how the next board I get could be better or worse. This is incredibly frustrating to have continuing issues with this board and having to constantly trial and error the problems. My previous motherboard was also an MSI which worked flawlessly. That was bought five years ago and after reading the reviews along with my experience, it's clear that the quality has plummeted.

I don't typically post reviews for items but felt it necessary to do so for this motherboard. I read through reviews and was aware of potential issues with quality control but thought I would try my luck. No such luck on this one. Hopefully others steer clear and avoid the headache.

I have gone ASUS and Gigabyte in the past with much better luck and may be turning back down that road.

One person found this helpful

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Bobby R.

Worth the few extra bucks to stay in it for the next few years

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2016

Verified Purchase

Awesome Motherboard, went with the I5-6600k, 4X4(16G) DDR4(2666). Feels like a great quality motherboard. The BIOS on this guy is easy to use and great for overclocking if you need it.

Pro:
Plenty of ports, helps me be future proof for SLI in 2 years.

Con:
None so far :)

Update on con: the USB fast charging only works on Apple products.

Support is a black hole if copy/paste answers that take a week to respond.

Love the board still. But the support leave me to find another for future purchases.

2 people found this helpful

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Rick C.

Love it

Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

There's a couple of reviews for this mobo that say it's DOA or that no ram for it works, so I was a little reluctant to buy it... but let me tell you guys, I'm so glad I did. The thing looks amazing, the red is very shiny and slick, and the steel PCI slots just make it that much better. I bought some Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 DRAM 3000MHz that compliments it pretty well, and worked right out of the box. Put everything together and it booted up the first time! Woo! XMP mode however when enabled wouldn't allow me past the motherboard boot screen, until I flash updated it. Since then, this thing has been amazing and I've OC'D my 6700k to 4.5 ghz with a little turn of the knob, keeping it at 25 degrees idle. The LED's on this thing surprisingly work well together, I say surprisingly because there's green, red, and a bunch of lights all over. I've always been ASUS for mobos, but MSI blew me away with this one and they might have gotten another customer. Thanks for reading guys.

8 people found this helpful

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Alfredo

DO NOT UPDATE THE BIOS!!!!

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2015

Verified Purchase

DO NOT UPDATE THE BIOS!

I installed everything, and it booted up fine, then, installed all the missing drivers and updates, everything was going fine until I updated the bios.
It finished updating and it restarted, but to my surprise, it just wouldn't display anything on the monitor, despite everything in the case firing up (fans spinning, lights were lit, DVD drive operational, etc) and it showed the following debug codes in a repeating loop: 00, 4C, 0d, 19, 55; after looking for the fix online like crazy, I found someone that had the exact same issue, and he said he fixed it by flashing the BIOS back to 1.4 (the update was to 1.7) so I did. And it booted once, then I rebooted, and once again the same debug codes showed up.

I took everything out and decided to try booting with just the essentials, cpu, 1 stick of ram, and the psu connected to the mobo, outside the case, using the mobo box as a test bench, and it still showed the same debug codes, so I decided to once again, flash the BIOS one last time while in this state, and after it finished flashing, it booted! It soon turned off since the cpu overheated for having no cooler attached though, however, I added the cpu cooler, plugged in the mouse and keyboard, and the monitor, and lo and behold, I was making it to BIOS.

I had to add part by part independently and try booting after every new little addition to see if it still worked, and it did every single time after that.

Now everything is working fine and dandy again like it was before the BIOS update, but the excruciating pain of trying so many different things to fix was terrible. And apparently, this issue is for all the motherboards in the MSI z170 line, at least with the m7 version you can use flashback, there is one review here in amazon for the m5 version (that doesn't have flashback) that had to return his mobo because the update bricked it, and with no flashback, there was no way to fix it.

So, yeah, this was a lenghty review, but I hope people can learn from my mistakes and I hopefully help someone in the same boat as me, because

35 people found this helpful

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Artur Kolasa

Good set of features

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

Good set of features, on a board that aims to straddle the lane between game enthusiasts and overclockers. With almost no effort you can get a good to very good overclock. The bios is wonderful, and the "go2bios" option on the quick boot program helps you tweak. The good thing with the bios continues as you have the ability to set temp profiles for all of your fans (you can do this with MSI Command Center, but setting them in your bios means that you can set your fans below 50% power and have the setting load automatically).

As for the negatives, there are a couple:

1) I could use more fan plugs. 2 cpu and 3 system fans is not enough if you are doing some serious air cooling.
2) I'm not sure if metal shield on the pcie slots does anything at all. It doesn't seem to be threaded through the board.
3) Only option for 2 sli setup.

Having said that, I am very happy with this board, and would highly recommend it.

One person found this helpful

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