MSI's Latest Motherboard Lineup: A Comprehensive Review

MSI has recently released a new lineup of motherboards that are designed to support the latest AMD Ryzen processors, including the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen Threadripper processors. The line includes the MSI MEG Z590 GODLIKE, which is built for overclocking enthusiasts and gamers, as well as the MSI MPG Z590 GAMING PLUS, which is a more affordable option for those looking to build a gaming PC on a budget.

One of the most significant new features in this lineup is the addition of Bob's Flashback Plus, which allows users to easily upgrade their motherboard to support future AMD processor releases. This feature ensures that users have access to the latest and greatest technology, without having to worry about compatibility issues. The board also comes with a Zen 2 CPU, which provides improved performance and efficiency.

Another notable feature of this lineup is the power delivery system, which includes 19 phases of power delivery. This allows for increased headroom and better overclocking capabilities, making it an ideal choice for those looking to push their processor to its limits. However, it's worth noting that there is no 10G Ethernet on this board, which may be a disappointment for some users.

MSI's X299 Tomahawk motherboard has also received attention, as it was recently awarded the "Design of the Year" award in 2018. The board features a unique design and offers improved performance compared to other motherboards in its class. However, it's worth noting that this board may not be available for review due to limited production runs.

In the world of laptops, MSI has also released several new models, including the GS 65 Stealth Light and the Xena series. The GS 65 Stealth Light is a thin and light laptop that features a 6-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics card. It also boasts a stunning 144Hz display and up to 8 hours of battery life.

MSI's Xena series laptops are designed for professionals who need powerful performance on the go. The most notable model in this lineup is the X-705W, which features an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 graphics card and supports ECC memory. This laptop is designed for heavy-duty tasks such as video editing and 3D modeling.

In addition to its laptops, MSI has also released a new storage solution called the 4-Way Octane 905P Envy. This drive features a maximum capacity of 1.5 terabytes and offers speeds of up to 10GB per second using x16 PCIe lanes. This is a significant improvement over traditional storage solutions and makes it an ideal choice for professionals who need fast data transfer rates.

Overall, MSI's latest motherboard lineup and laptop series offer impressive performance and features that are sure to appeal to enthusiasts and professionals alike. Whether you're looking for a board that can handle overclocking or a laptop that can keep up with demanding tasks, MSI has something to offer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entravel expenses for Computex 2018 paid for in part by fractal design yeah if you haven't seen our coverage of the fractal define r6 you should gotta check out our videos on the Defiant r6 we've done a three dripper build we've done a 9-iron build it's cool it's quiet its competent it's a really awesome case and you should check out our videos on that Chapel expenses for Computex also paid in part by asrock yes as rock with the many PCs and graphics cards and hex rocks just building everything these days whether you swing team red or team Blue has rock has got something for you I think so be sure to check out our coverage of all of their motherboards everything from iommu groups to full UEFI tours which I know only the people that are basically getting ready to pull the trigger look at those UEFI is everybody else doesn't care so big thanks to asrock for sponsoring us and you really should check out our other coverage of asrock products and our coverage from Computex 2018 hey soos ROG ROG Republic of gamers Republic of gamers Democratic People's Republic of gamers for IMD people unfortunately I'm sorry asus has had quite a lot of announcements this context they released her updated several new gaming laptops recently including the zephyrus and they also had some of the coolest props and lighting of the show and you know it took up a lot of floor space they had a literal red vs. blue gaming setup with gaming laptops and they were showing everything off from the thin and light laptops to their beastly upgradable laptops so depending on which laptop you wanted to play on you could experience you know playing games on that particular laptop asus also announced their rog phone yes an Asus gaming phone gaming phone is that a phrase that we're gonna hear very often at first I was a bit skeptical that this would you know turn out well but have uses in phones and zip phones are actually pretty good I've used those as my personal device so they might be onto something that the phones have a bin Snapdragon CPU for overclocking and running games I just I'm not gonna jump on the hot train here either so I'll reserve judgment until I play with one issues also had a lot of impressive and otherwise normal-ish systems on display along with high-end graphics cards and motherboards the rog ice sculpture though was probably my favorite a lot of people taking pictures you know a lot of buzz a lot of people get really excited about it it was pretty cool things were also hopping over MSI - first up they've got several new models of displays out these monitors are mostly 1440p or 1080p displays they've redesigned them so that they sort of snap together or click together in case you want to run a triple setup this triple setup screen racing like screen look whatever kind of racing Amos is I'm hourly sure was impressive enough that Thomas want to get into racing Sims I mean it looked really good it was a lot of fun the optics MGP 27 CQ is a 27-inch 1440p monitor with RGB and then it's not just our any RGB it's a msi mystic light but it's mystical eyes got the game hooks you need to remember so the LEDs can change or flash if for example you're low on ammo so you know playing csgo here your shoot your gun and as you get low on ammo the mystic light RGB LED on the monitor is gonna change you can program that to be however you want and mossad was also showing off of this display the ma G 21 CR the main feature here is there's no on-screen display it's controlled via software or a USB connection so I don't think this monitor will work with Linux I'm not gonna recommend it for like Linux users but I can see that it would be nice to be able to control brightness contrasts and other profiles via the on-screen display if you find yourself fiddling with that a lot I mean if you're going between like a max contrast configuration for gaming and whatever and a max accuracy configuration for professional work I mean it's a it's a P ITA to use the on-screen display on every monitor so toggling between a couple of different profiles is super annoying so I can see that this problem that goes away when you've got this kind of control software Emma saw is also baking in this nifty retractable headphone hook on some of their monitors it's pretty clever and I like clever 50 internet points to MSI this is the msi trident a a well it's an updated try the a because they've you know they've got the fifth and sixth gen core i7 version of to try them for a while now but they've made some pretty significant updates here this is almost an ITX system now climb the motherboard is built for an external power brick but otherwise it's a normal system it's with a gtx 1080i TI well up to a gtx 980ti you can get other cheaper graphics cards of course and then up to an eighth generation Core i7 8700 and while the graphics card is not really user replaceable you probably could do it but I'd really only recommend upgrading the nvme SSD and the memory it's basically a portable desktop this tried in a update also as enhanced RGB mystic light functions and a tempered glass door panel it just opens like a door which is pretty cool and that tiny machine really does pack quite a wallop it's actually powering this 32 by 938 40 by 1080 49 inch ultra ultra Akiba playing widescreen monitor the ma G 491 C holy smokes that's wide let's talk about motherboards this you know there's not really that I mean there's not really a lot that's changed I mean B 450 is new for the AMD chipset so you can get you know it's socket am four so the most change before 50 board that they have is the B 450 tomahawk the VRMs have been beefed up a little bit to handle the CPUs like the 2700 X and a little bit of overclocking the board layout has been updated as well II you know enough has changed on this board and I think I want to give it a full review like I actually put it through its paces I think and see how it does the previous tomahawk was actually a decent entry level board but you know entry-level board I think a lot of people were disappointed with it because they expected miracles from it and the tomahawk was just meant to be a cheap but decent board so I think MSI has listened to the feedback on this board and beefed this board up a little bit so that it's working pretty well because I mean at the end of the day that be 350 versus that be 450 there's not really any differences on the chipset side but it does give the board partners a chance to incorporate lessons learned into their second generation rising motherboards because hey I mean let's face it first up the gate with the booth Rises and nobody really knew what was going on it turns out rosin is actually pretty good now one big major new feature is Bob's flash back plus which means that your board is future proof 4 a.m. for compatibility you can buy this board in a Zen to CPU and the Zen 2 CPUs come out for example and it should be a simple matter to make sure that the board's software the UEFI is fully up to date for that Zen to CPU even if you have to get an old board there's also the MSI v4 to the a pro you sacrifice a few features but you've still got a board that can drive the 2700 X pretty well now this this is the board that made the headlines the X 399 of refresh board now it makes sense to me why the rise in documentation was talking about X 399 as if it was X 499 I don't think there is an X 499 it's X 3 99 refresh ok so the news here is the board's power delivery system holy crap it's nuts 19 phases it's obviously built for that 32 core thread Ripper that we saw on press day 19 power phases but there's no 10 gig Ethernet here I don't think I don't think that we need it or the people that are buying thread Ripper care about 10 gig Ethernet which I think for gamers if gamers of buying thread refer the gamers don't know what they're doing but you know Conti craters and other people like that I don't know I mean maybe an add-in card is okay it's probably okay I've got the PCIe lanes for days on thread Ripper so I could just get an add-in card it's also worth mentioning that MSI's X 299 tomahawk has actually run the if' design award for 2018 so it's a pretty impressive board that's one that I have not reviewed yet let's talk about laptops ok so this is the GS 65 stealth fin this laptop has been making the rounds and making the headlines literally everywhere this laptop is a laptop that I really want been wanting to get my hands on in person to see if it lives up to the hype it's probably one of my top three picks for a thin and light but powerful 6 core coffee-like laptops so I spend quite a bit of time playing with it I mean I really do want a 6 core laptop that can hit 4 gigahertz and has a lot of horsepower so it's gorgeous it's got a ton of i/o the connectivity seems like it's in a pretty good spot they said that it can do Thunderbolt and the full x4 Thunderbolt has a gorgeous 1080p 144 hearts display although personally I think I probably prefer 4k because I'm gonna be a little bit more on the productivity side a little bit less on the gaming side but they didn't have one of those on setup I think they're working on it maybe it's gonna be released I don't know they didn't that they're sort of like yeah we'll see if there's market demand for it so eight hours of battery life my goodness MSI also has Xena and workstation laptops yep this beastly one has ECC and Quadro graphics so ECC and quadra graphics in a laptop it's not completely bulky if it's not completely brick like actually there's a plurality and if you want to go fin and light super portable you know put middle of the road or the brick you've got options funnily enough I was one of several vendors showing off the 4-way octane 905 P envy me raid zero two important things here first it's a max of one point five terabytes adding the capacity of the largest 9:05 p.m. those who obtain drives that you can get and second there are x16 4x x4 add-in cards meaning that you can take 16 PCI Express Lanes and turn it into 4 m dot two slots for full bandwidth now finally available for X $2.99 remember if you have an X $2.99 motherboard that has onboard m dot 2 slots those onboard m dot 2 slots are bottlenecks because they're all wired through the DMI you have to use up your precious CPU lanes to get speeds like these 10 gigabytes per second each and that's pretty much it for MSI and the biggest takeaway here is I'm a dumb ass there's no X 499 X 499 is not going to be a thing it's cool I mean I knew that thought AMD was playing possum with that they weren't so is there anything in particular you the Intrepid viewer would like to see me test from all of this lineup and all of this stuff let me know in the comments or in the level 1 forums I'm Windell I'm signing up and I'll see you theretravel expenses for Computex 2018 paid for in part by fractal design yeah if you haven't seen our coverage of the fractal define r6 you should gotta check out our videos on the Defiant r6 we've done a three dripper build we've done a 9-iron build it's cool it's quiet its competent it's a really awesome case and you should check out our videos on that Chapel expenses for Computex also paid in part by asrock yes as rock with the many PCs and graphics cards and hex rocks just building everything these days whether you swing team red or team Blue has rock has got something for you I think so be sure to check out our coverage of all of their motherboards everything from iommu groups to full UEFI tours which I know only the people that are basically getting ready to pull the trigger look at those UEFI is everybody else doesn't care so big thanks to asrock for sponsoring us and you really should check out our other coverage of asrock products and our coverage from Computex 2018 hey soos ROG ROG Republic of gamers Republic of gamers Democratic People's Republic of gamers for IMD people unfortunately I'm sorry asus has had quite a lot of announcements this context they released her updated several new gaming laptops recently including the zephyrus and they also had some of the coolest props and lighting of the show and you know it took up a lot of floor space they had a literal red vs. blue gaming setup with gaming laptops and they were showing everything off from the thin and light laptops to their beastly upgradable laptops so depending on which laptop you wanted to play on you could experience you know playing games on that particular laptop asus also announced their rog phone yes an Asus gaming phone gaming phone is that a phrase that we're gonna hear very often at first I was a bit skeptical that this would you know turn out well but have uses in phones and zip phones are actually pretty good I've used those as my personal device so they might be onto something that the phones have a bin Snapdragon CPU for overclocking and running games I just I'm not gonna jump on the hot train here either so I'll reserve judgment until I play with one issues also had a lot of impressive and otherwise normal-ish systems on display along with high-end graphics cards and motherboards the rog ice sculpture though was probably my favorite a lot of people taking pictures you know a lot of buzz a lot of people get really excited about it it was pretty cool things were also hopping over MSI - first up they've got several new models of displays out these monitors are mostly 1440p or 1080p displays they've redesigned them so that they sort of snap together or click together in case you want to run a triple setup this triple setup screen racing like screen look whatever kind of racing Amos is I'm hourly sure was impressive enough that Thomas want to get into racing Sims I mean it looked really good it was a lot of fun the optics MGP 27 CQ is a 27-inch 1440p monitor with RGB and then it's not just our any RGB it's a msi mystic light but it's mystical eyes got the game hooks you need to remember so the LEDs can change or flash if for example you're low on ammo so you know playing csgo here your shoot your gun and as you get low on ammo the mystic light RGB LED on the monitor is gonna change you can program that to be however you want and mossad was also showing off of this display the ma G 21 CR the main feature here is there's no on-screen display it's controlled via software or a USB connection so I don't think this monitor will work with Linux I'm not gonna recommend it for like Linux users but I can see that it would be nice to be able to control brightness contrasts and other profiles via the on-screen display if you find yourself fiddling with that a lot I mean if you're going between like a max contrast configuration for gaming and whatever and a max accuracy configuration for professional work I mean it's a it's a P ITA to use the on-screen display on every monitor so toggling between a couple of different profiles is super annoying so I can see that this problem that goes away when you've got this kind of control software Emma saw is also baking in this nifty retractable headphone hook on some of their monitors it's pretty clever and I like clever 50 internet points to MSI this is the msi trident a a well it's an updated try the a because they've you know they've got the fifth and sixth gen core i7 version of to try them for a while now but they've made some pretty significant updates here this is almost an ITX system now climb the motherboard is built for an external power brick but otherwise it's a normal system it's with a gtx 1080i TI well up to a gtx 980ti you can get other cheaper graphics cards of course and then up to an eighth generation Core i7 8700 and while the graphics card is not really user replaceable you probably could do it but I'd really only recommend upgrading the nvme SSD and the memory it's basically a portable desktop this tried in a update also as enhanced RGB mystic light functions and a tempered glass door panel it just opens like a door which is pretty cool and that tiny machine really does pack quite a wallop it's actually powering this 32 by 938 40 by 1080 49 inch ultra ultra Akiba playing widescreen monitor the ma G 491 C holy smokes that's wide let's talk about motherboards this you know there's not really that I mean there's not really a lot that's changed I mean B 450 is new for the AMD chipset so you can get you know it's socket am four so the most change before 50 board that they have is the B 450 tomahawk the VRMs have been beefed up a little bit to handle the CPUs like the 2700 X and a little bit of overclocking the board layout has been updated as well II you know enough has changed on this board and I think I want to give it a full review like I actually put it through its paces I think and see how it does the previous tomahawk was actually a decent entry level board but you know entry-level board I think a lot of people were disappointed with it because they expected miracles from it and the tomahawk was just meant to be a cheap but decent board so I think MSI has listened to the feedback on this board and beefed this board up a little bit so that it's working pretty well because I mean at the end of the day that be 350 versus that be 450 there's not really any differences on the chipset side but it does give the board partners a chance to incorporate lessons learned into their second generation rising motherboards because hey I mean let's face it first up the gate with the booth Rises and nobody really knew what was going on it turns out rosin is actually pretty good now one big major new feature is Bob's flash back plus which means that your board is future proof 4 a.m. for compatibility you can buy this board in a Zen to CPU and the Zen 2 CPUs come out for example and it should be a simple matter to make sure that the board's software the UEFI is fully up to date for that Zen to CPU even if you have to get an old board there's also the MSI v4 to the a pro you sacrifice a few features but you've still got a board that can drive the 2700 X pretty well now this this is the board that made the headlines the X 399 of refresh board now it makes sense to me why the rise in documentation was talking about X 399 as if it was X 499 I don't think there is an X 499 it's X 3 99 refresh ok so the news here is the board's power delivery system holy crap it's nuts 19 phases it's obviously built for that 32 core thread Ripper that we saw on press day 19 power phases but there's no 10 gig Ethernet here I don't think I don't think that we need it or the people that are buying thread Ripper care about 10 gig Ethernet which I think for gamers if gamers of buying thread refer the gamers don't know what they're doing but you know Conti craters and other people like that I don't know I mean maybe an add-in card is okay it's probably okay I've got the PCIe lanes for days on thread Ripper so I could just get an add-in card it's also worth mentioning that MSI's X 299 tomahawk has actually run the if' design award for 2018 so it's a pretty impressive board that's one that I have not reviewed yet let's talk about laptops ok so this is the GS 65 stealth fin this laptop has been making the rounds and making the headlines literally everywhere this laptop is a laptop that I really want been wanting to get my hands on in person to see if it lives up to the hype it's probably one of my top three picks for a thin and light but powerful 6 core coffee-like laptops so I spend quite a bit of time playing with it I mean I really do want a 6 core laptop that can hit 4 gigahertz and has a lot of horsepower so it's gorgeous it's got a ton of i/o the connectivity seems like it's in a pretty good spot they said that it can do Thunderbolt and the full x4 Thunderbolt has a gorgeous 1080p 144 hearts display although personally I think I probably prefer 4k because I'm gonna be a little bit more on the productivity side a little bit less on the gaming side but they didn't have one of those on setup I think they're working on it maybe it's gonna be released I don't know they didn't that they're sort of like yeah we'll see if there's market demand for it so eight hours of battery life my goodness MSI also has Xena and workstation laptops yep this beastly one has ECC and Quadro graphics so ECC and quadra graphics in a laptop it's not completely bulky if it's not completely brick like actually there's a plurality and if you want to go fin and light super portable you know put middle of the road or the brick you've got options funnily enough I was one of several vendors showing off the 4-way octane 905 P envy me raid zero two important things here first it's a max of one point five terabytes adding the capacity of the largest 9:05 p.m. those who obtain drives that you can get and second there are x16 4x x4 add-in cards meaning that you can take 16 PCI Express Lanes and turn it into 4 m dot two slots for full bandwidth now finally available for X $2.99 remember if you have an X $2.99 motherboard that has onboard m dot 2 slots those onboard m dot 2 slots are bottlenecks because they're all wired through the DMI you have to use up your precious CPU lanes to get speeds like these 10 gigabytes per second each and that's pretty much it for MSI and the biggest takeaway here is I'm a dumb ass there's no X 499 X 499 is not going to be a thing it's cool I mean I knew that thought AMD was playing possum with that they weren't so is there anything in particular you the Intrepid viewer would like to see me test from all of this lineup and all of this stuff let me know in the comments or in the level 1 forums I'm Windell I'm signing up and I'll see you there\n"