Review on 🎮 Optimized for Gaming: MSI MEG Z590 ACE Motherboard (ATX, 11th/10th Gen Intel Core, LGA 1200 Socket, SLI/CFX, DDR4, PCIe 4, M.2 Slots, USB 3.2 Gen 2, Wi-Fi 6E, Mystic Light RGB) by David Thomley

This thing is buggy and uses too much power. It consumes 60 watts more CPU power across all cores than another board with the same Comet Lake CPU at the same frequency and voltage. For example, permanent overclocking of all cores with 5.0 GHz in Cinebench. It lowers the clock frequency to 4.6 GHz compared to the settings enabled in the bios. Disabling TVB cropping does not work. gigabytes don't. $500 for a motherboard that doesn't support overclocking? Cheaper boards get it right, so what's the point? Plus, the Thunderbolt ports feature a mini DisplayPort for video routing, which is a nice touch. But msi didn't contain any internal mechanism to pass igpu over thunderbolt. Gigabyte Vision D does exactly that. So if you want to use igpu video with Thunderbolt, you first need to get an HDMI to MiniDisplayPort cable and route the onboard HDMI output to the MiniDisplayPort input on the Thunderbolt controller. On Gigabyte, if the system doesn't detect a DisplayPort input, it automatically routes igpu video over Thunderbolt, eliminating the need for MSI's cumbersome solution. . It took several install/uninstall iterations to install Mystic Light which was very frustrating. Also, RGB doesn't seem to light up when the system is in standby mode, while Gigabyte and Asus have such a feature. Overall, this motherboard is overpriced, the latest bios is buggy when it comes to Rocket Lake, makes the CPU draw too much power (compared to other motherboards), and the Thunderbolt feature, while good looking, is a bit clunky. Alder Lake is coming and will have a completely different socket and shape (LGA1700 vs. LGA1200). So if you buy this board, do so knowing you won't be able to fit future processors into it. (Unless Intel changes course).