Product Showcase
The Z170 chipset will bring six Intel chipset based SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports to the motherboard. Combined in here are two SATA Express (SATAe) ports.
The board has two M.2 PCI Express slots using x4 lanes, each at 32 GB/sec performance. There are plenty of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports available through internal motherboard connectors.
You will get four DIMM slots offering support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to even 3600 MHz (OC). If you activate the XMP 2.0 profile in the BIOS, your memory will be automatically configured for you at its maximum clock speed and recommended voltage.
You can install a maximum of 64 GB in total. Again, XMP 2.0 must be supported, we'll show you this petite setup running at 2133 and 3200 MHz later on in the article.
MSI applied their Military Class V components on the motherboard with updated DrMOS MosFETs and aluminum colored dark caps that are not only going to increase the motherboard's lifespan, they look magnificent on this motherboard as well.
The board also has buttons for reset / power and a number of microswitches. BTW to the far right (hard to spot) there is a diagnostic POST LED, it will display the status/POST code. Once you have booted into Windows it will display the package temperature of your processor.
There is a new HUGE big rotatable button slash knob. This is an intresting one and is called the Game Boost Knob. The knob allows you to manually select a stage from 0 to 11 for overclocking your processor. So increasing this knob will increase the processor frequency and the cool thing is the voltage will be automatically adjusted as well. You power off the PC, rotate the knob to your preference and then start the PC. Apologies for the slight movement while taking the photo.
