Conclusion

Final Words 

Priced at 259 USD MSI offers a compelling product with the new X470 Gaming M7 AC, you get a properly fitted motherboard with all the connectivity and features you need. MSI offers nice audio, AC WIFI and Gigabit Ethernet (Killer E2500) jack. Other than that you get it all from proper M.2 performance, dual multi-GPU slots, six SATA3 slots, all the USB connectivity you need and overall a brilliant looking product with an improved VRM area. AMD made a very nice step forward with what pretty much is a bit of a die-shrink and tweaking. When you look at absolute numbers the 2700X is a good 10% faster than a 1800X, however, what you really need to be comparing to is the 1700X, and that's a 20% difference in performance. Now everything, however, has to do with the increased clock-frequency, over time the platform that houses Ryzen has evolved and matured as well, it all adds up from lower latency, better memory support, faster base clock, higher turbo bins, the accumulation of it all is what has become Ryzen 2000. It is a truly fast threading processor! Game performance at the lowest resolution, hey Intel still wins there but the margin and gap have become smaller. I stated in the original Ryzen review already that 1080p gaming really isn't an issue, except, maybe in that grey matter in between your ears. Everything is trivial towards pricing, and what I did not see coming is the price level of the 2700X. The asking price of 329 USD for this processor is just staggering and oozes value. With Ryzen 2000 / Zen+ the 3.8~4.0 GHz domain also has been breached. Zen+ can easily do 4.2 GHz, the top-notch SKUs 4.3 and with a bit of luck on all cores, you can achieve 4.3 or 4.4 GHz with a bit of liquid cooling. Ergo, I am impressed as to what Ryzen 7 2700X is offering.

The motherboard

MSI designed a dark looking X470 motherboard and, from an aesthetic point of view, the M7 just looks good. It functions well and offers a reasonable feature set including two M.2 slots. It has one Gigabit Ethernet jack and offers a nice audio solution. Next, to the upgraded VRM area, you get two 8-pin power headers and simply a well-designed board. Memory worked straight out of the box, we tried both the 3200 and 3400 MHz kits we have from G.Skill. Tweaking wise, the motherboards will not be any limitation, not from any brand as the Zen+ processor all will reach that 4.2~4.4 Ghz domain. 

Gaming performance

Previous Ryzen reviews have taught me that it is extremely hard to convince a big part of the guru3d community and reader base that Ryzen is plenty fast for gaming. The new Zen+ processors and the respective platform overall bring a bit more oomph compared to last years Ryzen. The fact remains, that if you take a Core i7 8700K it will still beat Ryzen in CPU bound gaming situations (low resolutions or extremely high refresh rate where a game is not GPU bound). The difference and gap towards Intel are getting smaller though. Get yourself a nice G.Skill FlareX memory kit at 3200 MHz and you've covered your gaming bases. Keep in mind that a CPU bottleneck always has been far less important compared to a GPU bottleneck, which why I'll keep saying it, that differential is trivial at best. Honestly, with the money you save on this processor compared directly to the cheapest eight-core Intel processor you can find, you probably should invest in a faster graphics cards. 

DDR4 Memory

The latest firmware for both the older 300 chipsets series and the new 400 Chipset series including the X470 have matured and is an accumulation of DDR4 memory support that evolved when the original Ryzen series was released. Memory compatibility should not and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs. I'll keep repeating this, but there are some really good Ryzen optimized kits out there. The G.Skill Flare X series at 3200 MHz CL14 is hitting a nice sweet-spot and is 100% stable + optimized for your Ryzen infrastructure. We also tested the new Ryzen Sniper X optimized kit from G.Skill, it runs 3400 MHz straight out of the box and will bring your memory bandwidth in the 50K rangers. However, take my advice:  Flare X at 3200 MHz CL14. Install it, activate the profile in the BIOS, restart ...  and never look back. 

Energy efficiency

With this processor now fabbed at 12nm TDP now has risen towards 105 Watts, that is a bit steep. Realistically, does anyone really care? I doubt it. A full PC at idle will sit in the 50 Watt range with a dedicated graphics card installed (GeForce GTX 1080 / 16 GB memory / SSD and the motherboard). When we stressed the processors with a Prime 1024M run we reached roughly 166 Watts. A threaded CB15 run, however, reveals close to 200 Watts of power consumption (for the entire PC). That certainly is on the high side. When we game we hover at 270~280 Watts, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of game and graphics card you use of course. So yeah, it's all a notch higher with the 2700X for sure, it's up to you whether or not this is a relevant thing for your purchasing choices. Remember, this is a fully locked & loaded eight-core and 16-threads processor. 

The conclusion

As with all motherboards, you really need to like the design and look, for the money I think MSI is spot on here, but obviously, a less sexy looking and slightly less feature rich 150 motherboards will get you the very same performance levels. With the M7 you get two nice M2 slots, properly cooled (if you're worried about that), great aesthetics, some RGB, proper tweaking options, reinforced PCIe and DIMM slots. Yeah, it's pretty good huh? A nice motherboard for your high-end PC experience, including gaming. Nice to see is the default implementation of AC wifi, unfortunately, it didn't perform that well in my office, but that is partly saturation as the number of WIFI connection here are astonishing these days. We feel with the latest BIOS the platform is strong, stable and easy to tweak. MSI offers a nice looking board that is RGB LED configurable and then offers all the usuals like the two x16 (x8 Gen 3) slots for SLI and Crossfire, a very nice audio solution and features like USB 3.1 are plentiful as well. On the memory side of things, just go for G.Skill FlareX and you are set. The motherboard feels stable thanks to a really quality build with proper components used, it is mature and comes with a pretty decent UEFI BIOS as well. The Gaming M7 AC is a nice high-end product, nothing less and surely worth your consideration if you're on the lookout for an X470 motherboard.

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