MSI Z490 ACE Review
MSI’s Z490 ACE board is their second-to-top offering this generation, and it shows. It’s got a 16+1 Phase VRM design, 2.5GbE AND WiFi 6, and a whopping £390 price tag. Let’s see if it can justify its immense price tag! But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Let’s start with what is amazing about this board – it’s VRMs. Seriously. It uses an intersil 69269 controller, and doubles its 8 channels to the listed 16 with intersil’s 6617’s, and uses top of the line ISL99390 drivers which are rated for 90A each. That means that in total, the ACE can deliver up to 1440 amps to the CPU alone, which is insane and definitely overkill for these tiny chips. Even while extreme overclocking, I can’t imagine one of these drawing, what, 2KW at 1.5V? They are power hungry, but not that much.
So, what does all that mean for you? Well, it means that even when you overclock the new 10900K, the board doesn’t break a sweat. I used both software monitoring and my new 4 channel k-type thermal probe to keep an eye on temps, and it didn’t hit more than about 70°c even on a less than ideal overclock setup. The CPU throttled well, well before the motherboard would. One thing to note by the way, if you are using this board – or any really – with the new i9, please do use both 8 pin CPU power connectors. 300W is pretty much the limit per 8 pin there, so definitely use both.
One reason for such cool temps is the tiny cooling fan built into the rear I/O – it’s hidden under the plastic cover and much to my surprise I didn’t hear it at all while testing, but it’s there keeping air moving over those VRM heatsinks.
While we are at the rear I/O, I might as well explain what’s new here. You’ve still got the usual USB ports, including type C, and 7.1 audio with SPDIF and surprisingly a PS/2 port, but also 2.5Gb ethernet and WiFi 6. While it’s a shame we are seeing the 10GbE ports disappear, 2.5G is still better than 1G, so I can’t complain too hard.
Otherwise, it’s a fairly standard Intel board. There are 3 M.2 Slots, all of which run through the chipset, with differing levels of ports being deactivated, including some SATA’s being turned off. Either way you are bottlenecking the speeds available, unlike on a Ryzen system as Intel still only offers 16 PCIe lanes direct from the CPU which normally all go to your graphics card.
An interesting note on PCIe is that this board, and many Z490 boards actually, technically support PCIe Gen 4. It’s just that these 10th gen chips don’t. The new socket, LGA 1200, is supposedly here so that on the next generation of chips they can double the number of pins used for PCIe and get gen 4 speeds on these existing boards. Sounds janky to me.
BIOS wise, it’s pretty standard for MSI. It’s easy to use both in easy mode and advanced. I really like MSI/s boot priority options, and has all the overclocking options under the sun, all on one page too which makes it nice and easy to find everything. I actually didn’t have a single bug when testing this board, so reliability, even while overclocking, seems decent.
So, for nearly £400 is it worth it? For the vast majority of people, no. It’s way overkill, even for the i9, so unless you know you want to do like custom watercooling and really push the new i9 you really can’t get much out of this that you can’t get on a board that’s half it’s price. It’s got some nice features, a good BIOS and man is it built like a tank, but for most people it’s nowhere near worth it. But what do you expect from a near halo-tier product? If you have this much money to spend on a motherboard, it seems like an amazing option.
Z490 ACE on Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/z490ace
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