AMD's new Ryzen/AM4 platform, with its eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X flagship chip, may be the hot new PC-component kid on the block. But the Intel Core i7-7700K is still one fast chip, and the unlocked, overclockable Intel Core i3-7350 sports high clocks for gamers and enthusiasts on a tighter budget. So we're fairly certain that plenty of people are still looking into building PCs around Intel's latest Z270 chipset, whether a cost-no-object feature-packed build or something that just handles computing basics.
MSI's Z270 Gaming M5 ($189.99) manages to pack in most of the features enthusiasts and gamers gravitate toward these days, including dual M.2 slots (and even a U.2 connector) for lots of speedy next-generation storage, metal-braced graphics-card (and RAM) slots, and software-controlled RGB lighting. The board also sports an attractive look if you like dark designs, although that can complicate the build process. And MSI makes things a little trickier on that front with some unnecessary plastic pieces that sometimes got in the way of connectors (and the fingers we needed to use to get said connectors where they need to go).
Despite those minor quibbles, there's a lot to like with this board. It's loaded with most of the important modern features, and it packs little in the way of unnecessary fluff (aside from those plastic parts). And it was selling for a reasonable price of about $190 when we wrote this in mid-March 2017.
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The Z270 Gaming M5 even has a few interesting, less-common features, such as a metal "shield"/heatsink that covers one of M.2 slots, and support for ultra-long 22110-style (110mm) M.2 drives in the other M.2 slot. We haven't seen a consumer M.2 drive that long yet, but if the extra length helps future ultra-fast drives break the 2TB capacity barrier, we'd be glad to have such a compatible slot on a PC we're putting together today.
Design and Features
With its black PCB and silver and ash-grey accents, the Z270 Gaming M5 is a distinctive, though very dark, board. But like almost every other mid-to-high-end motherboard these days, MSI brought along some RGB LEDs to lighten things up.
The RGB lights here add your choice of seven colors to a strip atop the chipset cooler, as well as a section underneath it, facing the bottom of the board. Accompanying software lets you plug in a standard LED strip and sync both it and the board's own lighting, so that colors and effects match up.
You can control the light colors and effects from within Windows, or from outside the system proper, with an iOS or Android device. These aren't exactly exclusive options, as many recent Asus and Gigabyte/Aorus boards offer similar features. But given that until a year or two ago, you couldn't accomplish similar lighting effects without buying an expensive pre-built PC from the likes of Alienware or Origin, these lighting options are nice to have.
As much as we like this board's design, we're not thrilled with some of the bulkier elements on the board, which seem to exist purely for style, yet complicate the build/upgrade process.
For starters, the plastic bits over the back edge of the board's expansion slots, seen in the top left of the image above, are cumbersome. The layout of these slots is well-suited to modern component setups, with two PCI Express x16 slots (wrapped in reinforcing "Steel Armor" to better handle heavy video cards), one additional x16 slot unbraced, and three PCI Express x1 slots. Given Nvidia's limiting of SLI setups to just two cards, we'd be fine if this board had just two x16 slots and a more spacious header layout on the bottom edge (more on that soon). That said, Gigabyte's Aorus Z270X Gaming 5 motherboard sports the same slot loadout, and a similarly crowded bottom edge. So MSI isn't alone in its design choices here. Plus, having a third slot may come in handy if you're looking ahead to multi-card setups using AMD's upcoming high-end "Vega" graphics cards, expected to arrive in the second half of 2017.
Speaking of M.2, our chief issue with the plastic around the expansion slots has to do with the M.2 drive connection areas. Installation of M.2 drives is already one of the most difficult tasks in modern PC building, thanks largely to the tiny screw required to secure the drives. Unless you have a good magnetic screwdriver, you'll almost certainly drop the screw onto the board multiple times before successfully installing your drive. And the presence of the plastic pieces both makes it tougher to fish out the small screw when you do drop it into the board (and you will), and makes it harder to hold on to the tiny screw when you are trying to install or remove your M.2 drive. Plus, the only practical purpose the plastic here seems to serve is to label your board's slots. But you obviously can't see the numbers on the slots with expansion cards installed. And given the black plastic on a black PCB, combined with the black interior of many PC cases these days, it can be tough to see those numbers without a flashlight inside the case, even with no expansion cards installed.
The other design flourishes that had us scratching our heads (and had us cursing a bit under our breath during the build process) are the bulky plastic shroud over the port area and the nearby metal heatsinks that live along two sides of the CPU area.
We're usually fine with shrouds covering the electronics behind the rear port plate, as they hide what's generally an unattractive collection of bare-metal clutter. But the housing here is boxy and seems bigger than it needs to be. Combined with the aforementioned plastic at the back of the expansion slots, it makes installing an M.2 drive in the top slot, as well as adding/removing a large graphics card in the top PCI Express x16 slot, more difficult than it needs to be.
All that said, the most intrusive aspect of the Z270 Gaming M5's design, in terms of the build process, has to be the metal heatsinks surrounding the VRM area on the left side and top of the CPU area. Their pointed edges are, again, clearly made that way for the sake of style, but they make plugging in nearby fan headers an almost-literal pain. And their shape, combined with the fact that the two sections are connected in the board's upper-left corner, makes plugging in the auxiliary eight-pin power connector extremely difficult. That's particularly true if (as is often the case), you're routing the eight-pin CPU power cable behind the motherboard, and therefore don't have much in the way of extra cable slack to play with.
All that said, for most builders who assemble a system once and only occasionally perform upgrades and maintenance, these are relatively minor problems that may be outweighed by the design, if you like the looks of the board—and we do like the looks of the MSI Z270 Gaming M5. Just note that if you're a novice builder, the black-on-grey aesthetics and black PCB will make getting all the small connectors where they need to go a little more difficult. So if you're unsure about what you're doing, be sure to double-check your manual.
While we're in the vicinity of the RAM slots, the board's four metal-reinforced DDR4 slots support up to 64GB at overclocked speeds of up to 3,800MHz. That's pretty high, considering the chipset's top officially supported speed is 2,400MHz. But other gaming and enthusiast Z270 boards support similar RAM speeds. We do like, though, that four handy LEDs up at the top edge of the board light up to tell you when a memory XMP overclocking profile is enabled. This is a minor detail, but one that will be appreciated by gamers and enthusiasts who want to know at a glance if their RAM is running at the expected speed, without diving into the BIOS.
The primary CPU fan header sits uncomfortably close to the top VRM heatsink (although we didn't have a particular issue plugging our cooler into it), while the pump power header for liquid coolers lives close by, around the corner, near the top-right edge of the board. In between these two headers sits the BIOS Flashback button. It's also inconveniently placed just above the rightmost RAM slot. But considering the primary purpose of this button is to recover a borked BIOS without having to install a CPU or RAM, it should be accessible in those very rare instances should you need it.
The Z270 Gaming M5 has four more main fan headers, outlined in red below. The first is located below the left VRM cooler, a pair live on the bottom edge near the diagnostic LCD, and the last sits on the right edge, above the main 24-pin power connector. These are well-placed for building a system with the cables routed behind the motherboard tray, which is what you'd want to do when building around a board that looks this good. We just wish the two headers near the CPU area were an inch or so further from those pesky, pokey metal heatsinks.
Below the 24-pin connector sits a horizontally mounted USB 3.0 header, which is another nice touch for those attempting a clean build. Just note that if your case has a narrow gap for routing cables to the right edge of the board, it can be difficult to bend the bulky USB 3.0 header cable where it needs to go. That's not an issue we ran into with the NZXT S340 Elite we used for our test build. But the fit was a lot tighter when we built another recent system in the SilverStone Redline Series RL05. You'll want to make sure your case has a fair amount of clearance in this area if you plan on connecting up your front USB 3.0 ports to this board, although a second vertically mounted USB 3.0 header lives along the bottom edge of the board if you need it.
Below the horizontally mounted USB 3.0 header sit the MSI Z270 Gaming M5's six SATA III ports. There's no support for SATA Express drives here, but we're glad for that, considering that most boards we've seen in the last couple of years have included this feature, despite not a single consumer SATA Express drive that we know of making it to market. M.2 has clearly become the fast drive interface of the future, with the U.2 tagging along on some boards, primarily to support the speedy Intel 750 Series SSD.
Speaking of M.2 and U.2, this board has those bases covered, and then some. A U.2 connector sits below the SATA ports, sheathed in metal for no clear reason other than aesthetics. It's not like SSD connectors are typically under stress and strain, and the U.2 connector was originally developed for enterprise systems, so we're fairly certain it can hold up to the wear and tear of a consumer PC.
The board has two M.2 slots, both of which have their own uncommon features. The topmost M.2 connector, which sits above the first graphics card slot, has mounting holes for four different lengths, up to 110mm (Type-22110). We have yet to actually see a drive that long. (Most M.2 SSDs these days are 80mm long.) But having the option to install one that is longer down the road is always good. We'd love to be able to drop in a fast NVMe-equipped M.2 boot drive with, say, 4TB or 8TB of storage in a few years, when the cost per gigabyte is lower than with today's high-capacity drives.
The second M.2 drive slot tops out at 80mm (Type-2280) drive lengths. But that's the most common size these days, and this connector comes with a metal "M.2 Shield." At first, we dismissed this as another purely cosmetic feature. But on taking it off to install a drive, we noticed that MSI put a thermal pad on the inside. The shield is meant to work as a heatsink, not just as a pretty piece of metal drive protection.
In theory, this could be beneficial, as fast M.2 drives are known to throttle back their speed as they get hot during sustained writes. But the fastest drives, such as the Samsung SSD 960 EVO, can write in the range of 2,000MB per second. So for most consumers, throttling won't be much of an issue because there just isn't another drive that's fast and spacious enough to push data to the main M.2 drive that fast. Still, it's an interesting added extra that could be helpful if you're often shunting massive amounts of data to and from your boot drive via some seriously speedy external drive or a second internal SSD. The board also supports Intel's upcoming "Optane" drives using the 3D XPoint (pronounced "crosspoint") tech the company co-developed with Micron. These drives are expected to be much speedier than even today's fast NVMe-equipped SSDs. Given the presumed speediness of these drives, the M.2 Shield and thermal pad may be more beneficial with these drives.
One other nicety about the M.2 connectors: Both of them support both SATA and NVMe drives, something that hasn't been the case for many M.2-equipped motherboards we've seen in the last couple of years. Note, though, that if you install drives in both M.2 slots, some of the SATA ports stop working. The details of this change depend on whether you have two SATA M.2 dries, two NVMe M.2 drives, or one of each. So be sure to check the manual before installing, so you won't be left wondering why your secondary storage drive suddenly doesn't work.
And if you are planning on using the U.2 connector, note that you can't do so while also using three graphics cards. According to the manual, installing a graphics card (or any card) in the lowest x16 slot disables the U.2 connector. These are the kinds of limitations inherent in Intel's mainstream 200-series CPU platform, and why many enthusiasts step up to chips like the Core i7-6900K and motherboards using the Intel X99 platform. These higher-end chips have 40 lanes of PCI Express hanging off the CPU itself for just these kinds of things. With current "Kaby Lake"/7th Generation chips, you get 16 lanes from the CPU. The Z270 chipset adds four additional PCI Express lanes on the motherboard versus its Z170 predecessor, but there are always going to be more trade-offs like this when loading up a Z270 system than with an X99 system and a high-end Intel CPU from that line.
Most of the rest of this board's connectivity is along the bottom edge, where all kinds of headers and other connectors live. Moving from left to right, you'll find the front-panel-audio header, a COM-port header, a four-pin header for connecting an LED strip, the two-digit diagnostic/temperature LED readout, the two fan headers we mentioned before, and a TPM header...
Believe it or not, that's only about half of what's down here. Further to the right are a pair of USB 2.0 headers, the second (vertically mounted) USB 3.0 header, the front-panel connectors, and an S/PDIF audio header.
About the only thing lacking that we often see on boards in this price range is a set of power/reset/overclocking buttons. The only onboard button here is the BIOS flashback button we mentioned earlier, up top near the RAM slots. But this board is geared more to gamers (hence the name) than serious overclockers or component testers, so we're willing to forgive the absence of onboard buttons. They can be handy at times when building or troubleshooting. But the diagnostic readout is more important for those purposes, and MSI did include one of those.
As for the port plate, the MSI Z270 Gaming M5 has most of what we'd expect on a modern motherboard these days. You get two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports (one USB Type-C, and one USB Type-A), DVI and HDMI for those without a graphics card (though that would be a strange choice for a "Gaming" board), a gaming-focused Killer E2500 Gigabit Ethernet port, a PS/2 port for legacy peripherals, and the usual allotment of audio jacks, including an optical S/PDIF-out.
Also here is another BIOS Flashback+ button, which lets you update or recover your BIOS without a CPU, RAM, or graphics card installed in your system. According to the manual, so long as your power supply is connected to the motherboard, you just need to plug a FAT32-formatted flash drive into the vertical USB port next to the BIOS Flashback+ button and press the button, and the board will install the new BIOS. This is a handy feature to have in the event of a bad BIOS update, or if, in the future, you're attempting to update the board to support future CPUs, and you don't have an older CPU available to drop in for the update process.
The only additions we'd like to see on the port section are Wi-Fi (which many gamers won't miss), and a few more USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports. Seven USB ports can be a little limiting these days, especially since one of those here is USB Type-C, and three of the total are legacy USB 2.0 ports. There are, though, four USB headers on the motherboard (two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0). So adding more via expansion-slot brackets or front-panel connectors is an option, though you won't find any of the former in the accessories box.
Accessories
Speaking of what comes in the box: Aside from the usual manual, driver/software DVD, collection of SATA cables, and flexible SLI bridge, MSI includes a metal MSI Gaming badge, and an extension cable for the RGB LED header. While all of this is appreciated, we would have loved to see an expansion-slot bracket adapter to make use of the USB headers. But these days, it's rare to find such adapters included in motherboard boxes unless you're opting for a truly premium board pushing close to the $300 range. So we're not going to ding MSI for their absence here. If you need them, they can be found online for just a few dollars.
BIOS and Software
As pleased as we are with the hardware MSI delivers with this board, the software could use some work—and some pruning. We first tried to manually install the MSI Gaming app from the Web, because it seems that's the only way to adjust the lighting on the board and any external LED strips you have installed. Technically, MSI offers an app, Mystic Light, for iOS and Android designed to let you adjust the lighting via your smartphone. But it involves entering IP addresses and connecting to a remote MSI server. That seems like a long way to go just to change your board's blinky-blinky.
But it turned out we had a long way to go, anyway. Attempting to install the latest version of the MSI gaming app (version 6.2.0.03) on two different compatible MSI systems (including, of course, the test build of the Z270 Gaming M5 we're looking at here) resulted in two different errors and the app refusing to open on either machine. So, we uninstalled that version and attempted to install the version on the included driver disc.
The good news is that the version of the MSI Gaming app included on the disc (version 6.1.0.06) actually worked. We were able to change the colors and effects of the lights on the board and an LED strip we attached to the four-pin header. Note, though, that with seven color options and five lighting styles, your choices here are a little more limited than on the Asus RoG Strix X99 Gaming board we looked at last year. Of course, the Strix X99 Gaming is a much pricier board, at about $335.
The bad news on the software front for the MSI board we're looking at here? In our quest to get the lighting controls working, we let the disc installer install all of the MSI software included on the disc, and wound up with a whopping 15 new icons on our desktop after rebooting. And that was excluding the Google Toolbar, Google Chrome, and 7-Zip add-ons that the disc tried its darndest to include in the massive bucket of utilities.
To be fair, motherboard makers have long included an extensive list of nebulously necessary programs on their install discs and on their support pages for download. But plunking 15 icons onto the desktop is excessive even by those lax standards. Gigabyte, for one, has done a better job on this front in recent years, by collecting all of these optional software features into a single location, called Gigabyte App Center. To be fair, if you go crazy installing options with that software, it'll probably clutter up your hard drive just as much as MSI's software. But at least you don't wind up with an explosion of ambiguous icons on your desktop. At the very least, MSI should follow Gigabyte's lead and collect the 10 or so MSI-specific icons here into one software suite.
As for the BIOS, it's more or less what we've come to expect from MSI boards, with both a big, button-driven "EZ Mode" for basic tasks...
...and an Advanced Mode that lets you drill down into menus to find more esoteric settings...
We especially like the one-button "Game Boost" overclocking and XMP RAM profiles buttons located in the upper left. Both feel like a good, easy solution for the kind of quick-and-dirty tweaking that gamers might want to try before jumping back into the latest AAA title.
Those opting for a serious overclocking-focused board, of course, will want to dive much deeper to achieve the highest possible stable settings. That can be done here, as well. But if extreme overclocking is your aim, there are certainly boards better suited to that task.
Competition and Conclusion
It's not easy to judge the value proposition of the MSI Z270 Gaming M5 when there are (as we write this in mid-March 2017) 192 models of Z270 motherboards available on Newegg.com, ranging in price from $109 to $499. At $189, this MSI board falls right around the middle of the pricing stack, as only a handful of models are priced above $300. But there are also plenty of very good options priced a little lower, around $150.
In MSI's own Gaming motherboard product line, the M5 is also the middle child. The MSI Z270 Gaming M3 sells for $139 and does away with the board lighting (while instead adding some red PCB accents), nixes some of the metal around the RAM and one of the graphics card slots, and makes do without a U.2 connector and the third graphics-card slot. But it still has the M5's pair of M.2 connectors. If you don't plan on using the U.2 connector, and you don't care about lights, this model is arguably a better value. The top-end Z270 Gaming M7, meanwhile, sells for $245 and includes more onboard lights, three M.2 slots, and a trio of metal-wrapped graphics-card slots. That board is clearly for the gamer who won some sort of component-hardware lottery.
The previous Z270 board we looked at, the Aorus Z270X Gaming 5 from Gigabyte, is also a midrange model. It sells for about $5 more than the MSI board. For that extra $5, you get some extra metal around the PCIe x16 slot, lots more RGB lighting, and a Turbo B-Clock integrated circuit (IC) designed to give overclockers more control over the BCLK frequency when overclocking. If those options sound appealing to you, they're certainly worth paying the extra few bucks for. But we like the looks of the MSI board better, and could really do without the bright LEDs Gigabyte slapped between the RAM slots on the Z270X Gaming 5.
In general, if you aren't going to use both M.2 slots (and possibly the U.2 connector), and you don't find RGB lighting a must-have feature, the MSI Z270 Gaming M5 is a bit pricey. There are plenty of options with almost as many features for $150 or less, including MSI's own Z270 Gaming M3. But for what it offers, the MSI board is priced roughly in line with the competition.
We'd like to see some of the bulky plastic and stylized coolers that complicate the build process done away with, and the price drop a bit as a result. But otherwise, the Z270 Gaming M5 is an attractive board with lots of gaming-friendly features. And a couple of features, including the metal M.2 Shield with its thermal pad, and the support on the top M.2 slot for very long drives, are unusual and could be useful in the months and years to come.
The board's dark design and aesthetic flourishes complicate the build process somewhat, so this may not be the best board choice for novice builders. And serious overclockers will miss the onboard buttons and advanced overclocking controls found in pricier boards. But for gamers looking for a board with lots of future-looking storage options, a little RGB bling, and dark design aesthetics, the Z270 Gaming M5 won't disappoint.
Just be choosy about how much of the bundled software you install. You probably won't want to use all of it, and if you let the disc installer do its thing without some discretion, your tidy new Windows desktop will get a thick coating of icon clutter.
MSI's midrange Z270 board packs next-gen storage features, tasteful RGB lighting, and stealthy looks into a package under $200. We like it, but could do without the plastic flourishes that complicate installation.
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