MSI Z170A Gaming M7 Motherboard Review

A very nice entry into the mid/top-tier range of motherboards, with a whole bunch of features, at a pretty good price too!

This is definitely a very feature rich motherboard, with a whole host of gaming-centred features. Starting off, we have the re-enforced PCI-E Slots, which help when you have a large and heavy GPU in the system. This is fairly common on Z170 motherboards, although MSI does claim this also aids with ESD protection – although I don’t really buy it. 

You get a Killer NIC, which is why you have a ‘Gaming LAN’ chip on the board, and is – rather obviously – nice for gaming as the Killer software does a good job of packet prioritisation and such. You’ll also get the Audio Boost 3 technology (enhanced with Nahimic software), which is always nice.

And yes, you still get the cool Split PCB design with Red LED lighting through it. You’ll also get 2 7-seg displays to show you boot codes, as well as the status LEDs at the top left corner of the board, which show what stage of initialisation the board is in (i.e CPU, RAM, VGA, Storage).

Moving around a bit, you’ll get the power and reset buttons, the bios Flashback button, the auto-overclocking button (big red one), and the BIOS switch.

In terms of storage, you get 2 SATA Express ports, two SATA 6GB/s ports, two USB3 front panel headers (one right angled), and two 32Gb/s M.2 slots.

And you get a pretty cool looking chipset heatsink (although not as cool as Asus’ Hero board!). Something to not actually is that this board is perfectly aligned with the Hero, to be a direct competitor – so at the end I’ll give my thoughts on the two and how they compare!

The rear I/O is made up of a PS/2 port, 3 USB 2 ports, Clear CMOS button, DisplayPort, 2 HDMI ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, Killer NIC, USB 3.1 Type A and Type C, SPDIF and full 7.1 audio. Not bad.
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Also, just a note – the power phase heatsink isn’t all that interesting, but does look pretty cool.

Something to note is that the chipset heatsink does light up, but only to show out the sides, not through, and has no customisation options.

I also really like the look of the line art on the PCB to show off their DDR4 Boost technology!

So, this is a really cool board. We tested it with 8GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 RAM, and an Intel i7-6700k, and found it to be pretty nice.

I think I actually prefer MSI’s BIOS to Asus’, purely from a lay-out perspective, but they do almost everything the other does. MSI’s EZ mode is nice, as it shows you the boot priority (which you can easily drag and drop to change), info on the CPU clocks and voltages, and the RAM too, you can easily turn on things like AHCI, Fast boot and XMP, ans well as their ‘Game Boost’ technology too.

Once you jump into the advanced mode, you’ll see the real meat of the BIOS, with the Hardware monitor to adjust fan curves, the board explorer to see what’s connected and detected, the M-Flash tool which I’ve used in the past, and works well, and finally the OC settings, which are pretty awesome.

It turns out that with Skylake, it’s actually pretty easy to overclock your K series chip – and with this board, it’s child’s’ play.

So I guess that rounds it off nicely. For me, I much prefer the looks of the Asus Maximus VIII Hero, and as it shares a lot of the features this one does – or very comparable ones anyway, I’d likely choose that over this one – although if you are looking for a relatively budget overclocking board, this one could be for you! This definitely gets the gamer approved award, as it’s a great board and has all the features you’d expect.