MSI Performance GAMING Intel 8th Gen LGA 1151 Motherboard (Z370M GAMING PRO AC)

MSI Performance GAMING Intel 8th Gen LGA 1151 Motherboard (Z370M GAMING PRO AC)

MSI Performance GAMING Intel 8th Gen LGA 1151 Motherboard (Z370M GAMING PRO AC)

so Intel's eighth generation CPUs codenamed coffee Lake are just around the corner and new CPU generations are always accompanied by new motherboards and chipsets and this launch is no exception now huge thanks to MSI who are very kindly giving me the opportunity to preview one of their Zed 370 motherboards before the official launch I'm not allowed to bring you any benchmarks due to NDA but I am allowed to show you the board and talk you through

some of its features and here it is this is the MSI z3 70 gaming Pro carbon a/c so looking at the board it's full ATX size and while most of the board shows it features with previous generations the power delivery has been changed to take full advantage of the new CPUs MSI have also added more power phases to get better overclocking but I can't give you any details about that at the moment because that is also under NDA now there are four ddr4 dimm slots there which

have this steel reinforcement around which is really nice these will hold up to 64 gigabytes of RAM now it has three full size PCI Express 3.0 slots they're there and they're allowing for two-way SLI or 3-way crossfire and SLI bridge is also included which is great and you can take advantage of SLI two of these PCI slots here in here they're reinforced with steel armor which is great because graphics cards are getting a lot bulkier and heavier these days and there's also

three PCI Express at times one slots for other peripherals there are two end up two slots which are here and here now this one has the m2 shield on it which has thermal pad underneath which will protect your m dot to drive from overheating for the RGB lovers out there MSI have included their mystic light and like sync which allows you to sync your RGB effects and colors all with one click or by use of the mystic light app from a mobile device now there's also

something special not only are there to RGB headers on the board but one of these is a new header called rainbow now this differs from the norm in that rainbow allows control of individual LEDs on the RGB strip rather than controlling them all at once this will give a huge amount of different effects and different color combinations that could be created and you get extension cables for both types included in the box now having worked together with Coursera

in the past MSI have now integrated a new three pin header onto the board dedicated for Corsair link it's going to be interesting to see what features this is going to bring to the already excellent Corsair link software and you do get an included cable for this also now for audio MSI have included audio boosts for and the hemic 2 plus with an added audio cover and the gold connectors for the pure is so impossible and there's also a digital output as well now the AC in the name refers to the fact that this comes with a Wi-Fi option this is actually both Wi-Fi

and Bluetooth and comes in the form of an included PCI Express x one card now it's gonna take up one of these slots in the board also in the Box are a Quick Start Guide a welcome leaflet reminding you to register the product with msi a nice big thick manual a couple of sites of cables with some labels for marking up which one goes where the rear i/o shield which is really nicely styled I do like to see this as opposed to just a generic metal cover and the software disk

MSI Performance GAMING Intel 8th Gen LGA 1151 Motherboard (Z370M GAMING PRO AC)

although you probably want to update these to the latest ones just by downloading them off the internet rather than using the disc now they've also made updating the BIOS even easier with just a hit of ctrl f5 in the BIOS sets the process off I'm the rear i/o panel of the board is a ps2 port two USB 2 4 USB 3.1 one and two USB 3.1 gen2 one a type a and one a type C for integrated video there's a HDMI port a DisplayPort and for Ethernet there's a Gigabit

Ethernet jack the front panel connectors across the board include 2 USB 2 headers 2 USB 3.1 headers the usual HD audio connectors and the usual front panel connectors here also on the board are for system part fan headers one CPU fan header and one CPU pomp header also there are six SATA 6 gigabytes connectors and the usual 24 pin ATX and eight pin CPU power connectors as far as the looks of the board go MSI have kept with the same style as their

previous Carbon series motherboards which to my mind looks fantastic add to that the quality of the board it's really sturdy and it really does look and feel like a premium product now as much as I'd love to give you a full summary of the board and what it can do as I say I'm not allowed to test this out with the CPU I'm not allowed to bring you any benchmarks so that does remains to be seen but let's just say so far so good very good well thanks you.