MSI X470 GAMING M7 AC ATX Motherboard for AMD Socket AM4 Processor

I’ve been building PC’s for over 20 years and believe it or not this is my first MSI motherboard, having historically purchased only ASUS and Gigabyte boards. However, I had a specific set of requirements which led me to this board: I wanted a X470 motherboard that would allow me to overclock my Ryzen 2700x to 4.2Ghz while maintaining good thermals at stock voltage, support fast DDR4 memory running at over 3200Mhz, control Corsair RGB, Standard RGB and Addressable RGB lighting from a single interface, allow me to use a NVME drive and still connect 6x SATA 3 drives without impeding SATA port availability, have AC wifi built in, have the headroom to allow me to add a second NVME drive in Raid 0 and a second graphics card in SLI in the future while coming in at as close to £200 as possible.This drive ticked all those boxes while coming in at below the cost of a Gigabyte Gaming 7 or Asus ROG Crosshair VII. The MSI board has better VRM temps than those boards too, and with a 12+2 phase power delivery I've been able to push my Ryzen to 4.2Ghz no problem without needing to play with voltages and can benchmark at over 1900 in Cinebench while keeping CPU temps at below 40c at idle and 70c at full load.The Mystic Light software is actually pretty good, and I’ve been able to achieve a variety of effects, however the new iCUE software from Corsair is much better so I am now using Mystic Light to control just my motherboard lights and headers, and iCUE to control the vengeance RAM and LL120 fans. Unfortunately the two pieces of software don't always work together. Hopefully MSI will update their software to add more effects in the future.Regarding looks I like the aesthetics of this board much more than the somewhat OTT Gigabyte gaming 5 and 7 boards, it’s not brash and like the subtle greys and unobtrusive onboard RGB effects, while giving you the option to add huge amounts of RGB if you so wish.In my opinion the MSI BIOS is better and more user friendly that the Gigabyte BIOS, as is the MSI software, however I think ASUS is perhaps a little better and from what I’ve seen the ASRock BIOS is definitely better and probably the enthusiasts preferred choice, however the TaiChi Ultimate board was well over my budget.Something I particularly like is that you can set fan curves in the BIOS for each of the fan headers independently as well as the AIO pump if you have one. This means I have managed to achieve near silent running at idle with the fans only boosting to max when I’m rendering.All things considered I am very happy with my purchase and glad I took the plunge and purchased my first MSI motherboard.

Motherboard sent my CPU into overdrive for some reason and made it overheat right on start up to 80 degrees with no programs running and the CPU fan was like a jet engine. The CPU got so hot it shut down my PC just installing a program. Tried lowering voltages to the CPU on BIOS with no change... Swapped motherboard to my old one and my CPU ran fine no overheating.

Excellent documentation!!Excellent biosDebug options galore: debug leds for cpu, hard disk, memory, motherboard PerfectHex code leds for spitting out an error or status (no beeps required!!)

I was build R7 3700X system. I dont wish X570 motherboard becouse thay have fan on chipset. Loking for good X470 board. I need options for flash bios without CPU and memory and with quality phase. Than i see this board. He has all what im searching. I flash first BIOS without cpu and memory. First boot needs same time. But when boot all working. Board have very quality build.

the best out of the box board i ever had brilliant in every way

I recommend this motherboard and supports the previous generation of Ryzen cpu BIOS is Good to

I recommend for gaming PC.

It was my first PC build. 2 months donw the line and perfect