Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsOk, BUT..
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2023
This is the first higher end MSI board i've used for quite some time. I picked it up to use with an 11900k i stumbled into and while the board itself worked i had some large issues with it.
First being the BIOS. As something billed as an overclocking/gaming motherboard the bios was pretty limited compared to higher end Aorus (gigabyte) and Asus products. Not quite a deal breaker since this wasn't for my gaming rig.
Second, and this WAS the deal breaker, the audio codec. It uses a Realtek alc4080 and i could not for the life of me get it to sound like anything other than hot garbage. The realtek software refused to offer anything other than basic functionality (no eq, no treble/base control, nothing) Using the Nahamic specific software gave a little bit of control but still sounded very poor compared to the alc1220 in the motherboard this replaced. This was on a set of Klipsch promedia 2.1s so i wasn't expecting a surround experience. It quite literally made them sound like the factory speakers from a 93 cavalier.
I returned it and replaced it with another board that used the alc1220 and my audio is back sounding as expected. I don't know if this is an issue with MSI's implementation of the codec, a flaw in the codec itself or something else entirely but personally i will avoid any motherboards using it from now on.
Lastly as more of a "what were they thinking?" comment. This board came with a flash drive for the drivers. This is good thing. The bad part was the ONLY thing on the flash drive was an .iso of the install cd. If you happen to buy the board i returned from amazon warehouse (if it ends up there) i left the drivers downloaded from MSI's website on there for you and a little note in a txt. Hope it helps.