The Gaming M5 motherboard from MSI supports Intel’s 8th generation of CPUs with the
Z370 chipset, so let’s find out what the board has to offer, how well it overclocks,
and if it’s a board you should consider buying.
My first impressions of the board are that it looks really plain and clean, it’s all
grey and black which is a bit different from MSI’s usual red and black colour scheme,
in any case I’m a fan.
It’s an ATX board and comes in at 30.5cm by 24.4cm.
Starting with the IO, there’s a PS/2 port for you old school guys, three USB 2.0 Type-A
ports, a clear CMOS button, DisplayPort and HDMI port, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A and Type-C
port, 2 USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, killer ethernet port, SPDIF out and 5 3.5mm audio
jacks.
While powered on the Ethernet port and two USB ports are lit up by red LEDs, and yes
I forgot to install the backplate.
Here’s what it looks like though, so you don’t miss out.
The rest of the IO is on the right side, where there’s 6 SATA 3 connectors.
At the center of the board is the LGA 1151 socket which supports Intel Coffee Lake based
CPUs, and as mentioned I’m testing with a 6 core 8700K here.
Next to the socket are the RAM slots, which have MSI’s steel armour, this is meant to
shield the memory sticks to give better overclocking, and although the board supports up to 4000MHz,
I don’t have any memory crazy enough to test this.
If you do plan on overclocking the memory, make sure you consult the QVL and buy compatible
memory sticks.
The 4 slots run in dual channel and can support up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, if you’re rich
enough to afford that at today’s prices.
Two of the PCIe slots are also reinforced in a similar manner to the memory slots, allowing
for some beefy graphics cards.
From the top down there’s PCIe 16, 1, 1, 8, 1, and 4 slots, and there’s support for
2 way SLI or 3 way Crossfire.
There’s an M.2 slot towards the bottom of the board amongst the PCIe slots, it’s got
a thermal pad and supports drives up to 80mm in length, and there’s a second M.2 slot
in the middle of the board just above the PCIe slots, which supports drives up to 110mm
long, and they can be run in RAID 0 or RAID 1 via the chipset.
There’s a debug code LED down the bottom, which is useful while troubleshooting, as
well as a bunch of your typical connectors, including audio, RGB, USB, fan, TPM, and front
panel headers.
In total there are 6 fan headers on the board.
Now with the info out of the way let’s install the board and try some overclocking with the
8700K.
My testing has been done using the latest BIOS, I updated it prior to running anything.
I’m using the Fractal S36 all in one CPU cooler here, and I was able to easily get
the CPU up to 5.1GHz, so a pretty nice boost.
We can see in the Cinebench multi core score there’s about a 17% increase from the overclock,
although this will of course vary depending on how good the CPU that you pair with the
board is.
With the board powered on and running there’s some RGB lighting on the chipset cover, and
a strip near the PCIe slots, although both get covered up pretty well by the graphics
card.
The lighting can be controlled through MSI’s Mystic Light Sync software, and there are
a number of effects available, including breathing, flashing, double flashing, marquee, stack,
rainbow which is what I’ve got it on, CPU temperature, and more, or can be completely
turned off if that’s not your thing.
To boot into the UEFI simply press the delete key during boot.
I found it really easy to navigate and quickly make changes, including overclocking.
So what did you guys think of the Gaming M5 motherboard from MSI?
Overall I thought the board was fairly high quality, it looked and felt nicer than my
ASUS Prime Z370-A, however the ASUS board is $50 less so that should be expected.
In the US it’s currently going for around $199 USD, and here in Australia it’s about
$319 AUD.
If you’re not planning on buying an unlocked CPU then you’ll probably be better off waiting
until there are cheaper motherboards available, otherwise if you want to overclock pairing
the M5 with a overclockable CPU looks like a good match.
Compared to other options, based on the price it seems to be a mid to high range choice.
There are some nice features and extras, and the RGB lighting is pretty subtle and not
going overboard.
Be sure to let me know your thoughts down in the comments, as well as what motherboards
you’re looking to buy and why?
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