Gaming: Upcoming Msi Meg X870e Ace Max Review

You’d need to be slightly mad or very rich to own a $700 motherboard, and you should max out your graphics card, SSD and cooling before you did too, Still, if we had that kind of cash left over in our PC budget we’d own this stunning motherboard in a heartbeat.

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MSI has had a sizeable gap in its high-end X870E product stack, with its Carbon Wi-Fi option sitting well below the likes of the ultra high-end Godlike models, which now have several variations. The older X670E chipset benefitted from an additional model, the MEG Ace, and it’s this model that finally makes the transition to AMD’s latest high-end chipset in the form of the MEG X870E Ace Max.

Offering more features and added aesthetic tweaks than the Carbon Wi-Fi, but with a substantially lower price tag than the cheapest Godlike models, the MEG X870E Ace Max is an imposing beast bristling with high-end features. These include 10 Gbps Ethernet, dual PCIe 5.0 SSD support and loads of overclocking and tweaking features that will keep you busy for days.

As well as offering the new features of all of MSI’s new Max range of AMD motherboards such as a 64 MB BIOS for new feature and CPU support and independent base clock frequency adjustment with jumpers for on-the-fly tweaking, you get all the other benefits of the flagship X870E chipset and then some.

There are a pair of USB4 Type-C ports and the added bandwidth of this chipset means that the slowest USB ports on the rear I/O panel are USB 3.1 10 Gbps. It has nine of the latter by way of Type-A ports and a further two Type-C offering the same speed too. The front panel Type-C port that hooks up to your case is USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps and even offers 60 W power delivery for fast charging laptops or power banks courtesy of an extra PCIe power connector.

Socket: AMD Socket AM5Chipset: AMD X870ECPU compatibility: AMD Ryzen 7000/8000/9000 desktopForm factor: ATXMemory support: DDR5-4800 to DDR5-8400 (OC), up to 256 GBStorage: 5x M.2, 4x SATA USB (rear): 2x USB4 Type-C 40 Gbps, 2x USB 3.1 Type-C 10 Gbps, 9x USB 3.1 Type-A 10 Gbps, Display: 1x HDMI, 2x DisplayPort over Type-CNetworking: Marvell 10G LAN, Wi-Fi 7Audio: Realtek ALC4082Price: $699 | £599 | $AU 1,322

The headline feature list is a long one. You get 10 Gbps Ethernet as well as 5 Gbps port, and dual

Source: PC Gamer