20 Best Motherboard For Intel I9 10Th Gen (2023 Updated)

DOA. Buy a lot of Asus for work (graphic design). Other products have been reliable. This Proart Z490 would not post. Dreaded “No keyboard detected, Press F1” loop. No known solution. Tried all the crazy web solutions – nothing worked.

Mobo would not recognize any USB or devices. Swapped them all out including power supply. Nothing worked. All devices posted and worked on bench PC.

Very nicely designed board. Plenty of I/O. Perfect for my needs.

Just got this board for my other half and he LOVES it, it came this morning and I’ve spent the evening installing everything and he’s enthralled 🙂 I’m actually a little jealous

This purchase represents the fourth MSI motherboard I’ve purchased, each of which a different models/grades, and while I lack experience with other motherboards, I think MSI makes it easy to build and set up, not to mention, I haven’t had any problems whatsoever with their components.

Installing drivers is a breeze compared to restoring any prebuilt computer of my past. Regarding the Tomahawk specifically: it’s certainly not as flashy as the MSI Z590 Gaming Edge Wifi that I have on another system, but it seems to have all the essentials for a mid-range build.

I really didn’t find any obvious difference between this model–the Tomahawk WIFI–and the Gaming Edge as far as functionality, which surprised me because I think the Tomahawk was listed at about $120 lower at the time I bought it, and that price difference together with the similar specs made choosing the Tomahawk easy this time around.

I didn’t find this board cramped for the components I used–GTX 1650 super graphics card which is not particularly huge, Corsair Vengeance LED Ram sticks (not unusually tall), Corsair h100i AIO cooler (which unfortunately was DOA and subsequently uninstalled and replaced with stock fan), m.

2 ssd and other necessities. I suppose if you’re after a big budget build, this probably would not be your choice, but I think it’s quite fine for casual gaming. Finally, this was designed for 11th gen processors, but MSI came up with an update to flash the bios to accept the 10th gen.

Because this change happened later, I think that accounts for confusion. Honestly, I’m not sure how you flash the bios to accept a processor that hasn’t been installed; or use a processor that the bios hasn’t been yet flashed to accept, so if you are planning to use 10th gen processor, you might want to do a little research first.

The 11th gen price has dropped considerably and is the last generation to be accepted by this mb, so that’s something to consider as well.

Installing wasn’t too difficult and the instructions were thorough enough. I had two main complaints. First, the proximity of the RAM slots to the processor is very close, thus making it difficult to fit a properly sized cooling apparatus over top of the processor without sacrificing slots.

This is because of the fan (Cooler Master) really; the fan protrudes way out, which is good for cooling but really does eat up space. Have to figure out a clean solution for this. Second, this board DOES support NVMe/PCIe/M2/M-Key (the industry needs to get back to simpler naming if they’re going to go around changing SSD tech again), but the way they do it is a bit confusing.

See, this went into a new PC that I built to basically upgrade/replace my business PC (a pre-built DELL), and DELL uses the tiny M-Key SSD in their towers. Well, this board DOES work with those. but not optimally.

If you look at the image, there’s a plate that says “02”. You need to remove this, and underneath is an M-2 slot. This slot supports M-Key SSDs, even the small ones, but there’s no screw hole to secure it in place (they only have screw holes for the longer SSDs).

Which means the only thing holding it down is the plate itself. This works but isn’t optimal. I don’t know why the board manufacturers are not making their boards compatible with the smallest size SSDs given that it’s where most of the pre-builts are going.

This was a bit of a tight fit into a pretty large tower. It wasn’t too big of a deal except for the power supply frame; two of the wires are basically right up against it plus I needed to add my USB3 expansion card (this already has 6 slots, but I bought it, so.

) and the wiring are right tight against the card, which bothers me slightly.

Let me begin by stating I’m not a trained professional. This is the fourth or fifth computer I’ve built with many years in between each build. I always thought MSI was the company at the top of the computer parts game.

My first board from newegg arrived on time. When I opened the actual MSI box the first thing I noticed was that there were pin holes in the cardboard where parts of the motherboard pierced it. There was no foam to cushion the board in the box at all it was strictly wrapped in an antistatic bag.

I got the PC up and running with a new clean copy of Win 10, used the drivers on the provided usb drive to update the board but could not get it to connect to the internet. (wired) So downloaded new drivers off the MSI site and installed those.

Still no love, lights would come on when unit was powered off, but they would go off as soon as I hit the power button. Checked the Dr. Google, MSI forums, common problem, called the MSI help desk that stated if I downloaded new drivers and conducted a few other troubleshooting techniques it was probably a bad board.

I contacted Newegg who promptly provided instructions on how to return it for a replacement. Got the new board in and noticed the same damage inside the box as the previous board. Put everything together and experienced the same problem.

I went back to the forums and found one statement by an individual that said theirs worked if they throttled back their lan settings to 100 Mbps full duplex. Once I did that it worked. I’m hoping that MSI provides a fix since my fiber provides 1000Mbps and I would like to use what I pay for.

I think the MSI helpdesk should have known about this issue since it is a significant topic of discussion on their forums.

After purchasing the i9 12900k I had to make a choice on motherboard/ram to pair with it. After deciding that im going with DDR5 I settled on this board here with some trident z5 5200mhz. Its been about a month now and everything is still running as good as can be.

Not only is it a very powerful motherboard, it also looks gorgeous and matches my build perfectly. I would definitely recommend this board to anyone looking to upgrade to a 12th gen chip and DDR5 memory.

The only issue I had was during initial set up I was missing my lan, wifi, and bluetooth drivers along with a handful of others. With no internet and no CD drive I had no way to get those drivers. The simple solution was to buy a cheap external USB disc drive and pop in the CD that comes with the motherboard.

Youll be able to download any missing drivers in seconds. Hope this helps!! #PCMASTERRACE.

I couldn’t believe how heavy and solid this motherboard was when I opened it up and held it. The heatsinks are top notch quality, it has all the features you could ask for, more then enough expansion slots for ssd drives, all the i/o you could possibly need, plus it’s ddr5 compatible.

The icing on the cake is the nice rgb “”Republic of Gamers”” light that illuminates on the board. I love. Don’t believe these 1 star or 2 star reviews, they either have no idea what they’re doing or are taking their frustration out on a review.

If you buy this board, I GUARANTEE you, you will not be disappointed.

Not sure if its a dud or not, but PCH should NEVER be this hot. Has caused crashing and USB issues, as well as system lockups. I’ve read that they run hot, but not 100+ C hot. I can’t recommend this board, while everything else runs fine.

Again, no OC, updated latest BIOS (Version 0811 of this review). I have a watercooled 3090 and an i9, both are under 40C idle while PCH chipset sits at 89C undervolted. What is this garbage?.

Easy to manage your case fans and rgb thanks to the great bios. Room for a double slot gpu without blocking pci slot needed for a wireless card. Has inbuilt troubleshooting q led lights which helped me discover a defective ram stick.

Would reccomend.

This Motherboard , No Issues at all, Good upgrade paths to upgrade the components in the future. RGB Lighting controls is amazing. This Motherboard is great when paired with a i5 10400f.

Clean and easy BIOS to use, Armory Crate is also easy to use to keep updated. Can’t really find any fault after using now for a few weeks on a second build. Would recommend.

MSI has been called out lately for their business practices. They are not a scrupulous company as reported by industry insiders on numerous occasions. The Voltage regulators they use are substandard and they over specify the capabilities of their designs.

This is not a terrible board, but it is NOT an overclocking board. It is likely this board will not support two 30 series GPU’s without trouble. I would say this is a good desktop board, or an average gaming board it’s not a high performance gaming board if you plan to use the latest high end equipment.

I have pushed this board to its limits and it fails where other boards will continue without issues (EVGA Z490). I’ve been overclocking for 35 years. For the price this is a solid gaming board, if you want to overclock buy a more expensive board this is not suited for overclocking all components.

And it defiantly will not support high frequency memory and an overclocked cpu, I’ve tried with multiple memory sticks and kits from multiple manufacturers some on the qualified vendor list some not.

None will run at the frequency they should and do on other boards. The funny thing is I have a kit from a manufacturer that is no on MSI’s Qualified Vendor list and although it won’t run 4400 MHz it does better than kits that are on the QVL.

This is a good board for the money. I got it for the reason it had everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. I could not justify the price they want for the one non rgb Asus 490 board. This board works great, it takes my 10900k and 3080 with no problems.

The ram I purchased was a little unstable but this board makes it easy to find a worthwhile timing that is stable. Bios work well, easy to navigate and tweak settings. One thing to note though is that it does not read the rpms of a corsair water pump, nor drive it correctly, this nearly melted down my cpu before I noticed what it was doing.

You have to manually adjust the pwm settings for the pump to run at 100% at all times. The windows dragon software is hot garbage and you’ll do yourself a favor to uninstall it and use Intel utilities for ram and processor over clocking and the bios to set your fan speeds.

This was my first build in 6 years and I treated myself. LIAN LI O11 Dynamic XL MSI MEG Z490 UNIFY LGA 1200 Intel Z490 Intel i7-10700k MSI RX 5700XT Gaming X (from previous build) G. SKILL Trident Z Royal Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 4000 (PC4 32000) F4-4000C15D-16GTRS Seasonic Focus PX-850 Corsair H115i RGB Platinum Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB – M.

2 NVMe SSD 2x – MSI Optix MAG321CQR Notice all of the MSI? Over 19 years and a ton of their products, none of them have ever failed. My previous system was an i5-4670k that ran at 4. 4GHz (stock was 3.

4GHz) for it’s entire life on a MSI Z87-GD65 GAMING. This thing was on 24/7. A few months ago the power supply begin to fail. It took out the AIO cooler and started to run HOT. You could see the heat on the PCB from the VRM to the CPU type of hot.

PSU was toast, house smelled like burnt plastic for a week. Replaced the PSU and CPU cooler, kept the overclock and the computer is running just as good as it ever has. The board had all right to fail in that situation, but the power regulation on it was good enough to keep it going.

Point is, I value durability and reliability in a build. If it doesn’t work it’s useless, and MSI products have been bullet proof in my experience. This board has the features I was looking for and the power management that can handle far more of an overclock than I will ever throw at it.

I will always buy MSI at whatever price point I am looking at as they have earned my trust. Hopefully it will be a Godlike next go round:).

I would recommend this board to anyone who doesn’t need flashing lights. It’s pretty plain Jane, but plenty fast enough for my little (20 to 40 track 24/48K) track projects. 1/2022 update: My projects have grown and I’m using Cubase Artist now.

Some of my projects have used upwards of 75 tracks, with some of the tracks having 4-5 ‘lanes’. A lane is like another track except it used the first tracks plugins, effects and settings. I’m using 3-4 times as many plugins as I used to and had to double the RAM.

When I’m working the machine is on for 7-12 hours a day. I have never had a hardware crash of any type.

I’ve owned a few MSI products before and never had any issues with them in the past. Aesthetically, the motherboard is sleek and very minimalistic, but it’s packed with a lot of features for tweakers.

It’s also great for those who are building in an ITX case that doesn’t have ample number of storage mounts, since this is the only Z690i board I’m aware of that has 3 m. 2 slots. There is one MAJOR issue to be aware of, especially if you’re an EVGA FTW3 card owner.

Cards with backplates that cover every bit of the PCB (including the area running along the PCIE slot railing, opposite from where you would screw into the case) will NOT fit this board if you slot it via traditional horizontal mount and you will not get any video signal.

What I mean by that is on the bottom of the motherboard’s I/O panel’s heatsink is a very tiny nub (check an enlarged image of this board). That nub houses a screw from the back which allows the heatsink to mount.

The problem is that small protrusion interferes with the GPU backplate and it won’t allow the GPU to fully be flushed into the PCIE slot. Compare an MSI card (or any card) and an EVGA cards’ back plate and slot railing, and you’ll know what I mean.

Your only solutions for getting the card inserted is to dremel the piece off the gpu backplate, remove the backplate entirely, or vertical mount it with riser cables. Not really an oversight on MSI’s part since all GPU manufacturers have their own backplate designs, but this is something to be aware of.

Luckily, most of the cases on the market allows GPUs to be mounted vertically, so this shouldn’t be a problem. But for those who have ITX cases that can only mount horizontally, please be aware. The board isn’t broken, it’s a clearance issue.

I usually go with the Asrock stuff due to their fast post times, but availability was a problem. So I tried this board due to past MSI boards posting quickly for me. With all the tweaks I know best post time for this board was 8.

6 secs. which was ok but of course as other users have noticed, Intel has done something to their boards which causes a delay in power-on when you first turn on the system from a power loss. I use a power-strip to control my monitor and PC, so that is same as a power loss since I turn off the strip each time, and that causes a 4 sec delay from when the system gets power to when the sys actually turns on.

,I noticed this trend on Intel boards ever since the PCI-4. 0 chip-sets were released, AMD boards have no such delay. According to an MSI tech, he believes it is a side-effect of the security side of the boards.

All Intel boards I have tried have this delay, and I tried a dozen different boards from all the Manufacturers. Anyway, so much for a 10 sec boot! Back to the board, this board ran my G-skill DDR5 6000 mem perfectly with the XMP setting, that was nice.

I use RGB lights and fans and I needed a splitter since this board only has 1 3 pin header, but no big deal there, the rgb works well but here’s is the downside, it you use the Mystic-light program installed from the MSI center software, this will cause a 4 second delay in win 10 shutdown time, windows has an issue killing the light services quickly.

Which brings me to the MSI center software, it is total junk! Mine crashed about 50% of the time for no apparent reason but I read this is normal for MSI software so forget running the MSI software, set it and kill it.

I ran some benchmarks on this board with my Intel 12900K and 3600 ti vid and it did ok, the asrock board was a little faster but just barely. 1 thing of note, MSI has phone tech which is nice, of the big 4 board makers they are the only 1 that still allow phone service.

The 1 click xmp setting worked great, the cpu OC button does work but the performance gain is almost nothing, if your gonna over-clock do it manually. I have the Asrock DDR5 board on the way so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up to this board.

MSI’s Unify z690 is one hell of a motherboard First off its black and built like a tank the beefy VRMs are very high quality. Best Z690 you can buy imo. Handles my 12900k beautifully. This board does not have RGB and no video output which is why I bought it lets face it people arent running integrated video with a board like this anyway.

Only disadvantage is if you need to use onboard video in which this is an enthusiast board. my point is most enthusiast have at least 2 gpus. The boards feature rich and yes it can have RGB hooked to it.

The board just doesnt have flashy leds and such except the temp/boot display. The board maintains very good temps even with the 12900k mid 50s during heavy gaming sessions running AAA games cranked way up.

Despite what people tell you the Noctua D15s handles the 12900k fine and fits perfectly on this motherboard no issues. When you choose ram however watch your height with the D15. The board comes with loads of extras as if the board wasnt enough.

Fantastic for solid black stealthy builds. The board has a flash back bios button and also has chipset drivers on a mini usb msi drive that comes with mobo. Super pleased MSI you guys owned it thanks.

If it’s not obvious, most of the cons are just nitpicking. It’s a solid board that’s packed with features for a great price. I’m very happy with it. That being said, here are a few things you should know before buying: – If you plan to do extensive overclocking, make sure you get a PSU that has both an 8-pin ATX12V as well as another 4+4-pin ATX12V.

You’ll need both. No overclocking? Just the one 8-pin is fine. – Pay attention to the width of whatever CPU heatsink/fan combo you are using. My heatsink is 60mm wide with a 25mm deep fan. If you plan to use all 4 RAM slots, make sure your combo is thinner than mine.

A few things that I really enjoy about this board: – I really like that the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are “integrated”. It’s cheaper than buying a comparable board and separate wireless card, and it takes up one less slot on the board (not that I’m worried about running out of slots.

) – There are a lot of mATX boards that only come with 2 DIMMs for RAM. That’s usually fine, but the flexibility to upgrade down the road is great to have. – I genuinely do not think I will ever run out of USB ports.

– It’s such a small thing, but the EZ Debug LEDs are great. First go around, RAM wasn’t seated properly and it eliminated the headache and guesswork by instantly showing me the problem was with the RAM.

Build: Intel Core i7-10700K XFX Radeon RX 580 8GB Black 2 x G. SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB DDR4-3200 (F4-3200C16D-32GVK) 1 x ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED CPU Heatsink and Fan Thermaltake Smart BM2 550W Fractal Design Define Mini C TG.

The board is probably the best mATX z490 board, having a solid memory topology to allow for good memory overclocking and a good variety of features such as SLI/crossfire support and solidly built VRM heatsinks.

I wish MSI would have also used the same dr mos setup as they used in the Gaming Edge ATX version, but instead they used a weaker discrete mos setup which is more similar to the Gaming Plus ATX board.

Nonetheless, this board has performed well for me and heating has not yet been an issue. One gripe I have with the board is that the m. 2 screw on the heatsink was crossthreaded, which made the heatsink unusable once the screw was removed as it no longer wants to stay in the screw hole with worn threads.

This is a bit disappointing, but not a dealbreaker for me and I have reached out to MSI to see whether they would ship for me a replacement screw bracket. The mATX boards often get neglected by manufacturers, which is a pity given that the form factor is not only perfect in size, but also provides enough room for full 4 ram slots and an additional couple PCI slots.

In this case, MSI took good care to create a solid mATX board and I applaud them for that and I hope they continue that trend into future boards. MSI has in fact improved their quality quite a bit since the old days when MSI was considered a lower tier manufacturer.

I’m happy to say their current z490 lineup is to be reckoned with. One of the big appeals of their z490 boards is that they are all PCIe 4. 0 ready – so that when Intel comes around and implements PCIe 4 compliant CPUs in future, these boards will be ready for it — only Gigabyte and MSI have claimed this for z490.

Additionally MSI BIOS is very clean and user friendly, including lots of overclocking features, while retaining a GUI that is usable and not overly complicated. Their EZ Debug LEDs will also help greatly in overclocking experiments.

This review is for the MSI Review Rebate Program.

I’ve been using MSI motherboards for quite a few years in many different builds and continue to be impressed with each one. The overall quality, fit & finish, and options on each board has been stellar and this board is no exception.

This was my first mATX build, and aside from the missing PCIe slots (which I didn’t need in this build) everything is here that I need. The pre-installed I/O shield helped simplify the build process and looks great.

The dual M. 2 slots meant I could still fit a lot of local storage without breaking the bank and skip any 3. 5/2. 5 drives, and the included M. 2 heatsink was a nice bonus. I had zero issues on the first boot, and was ready to go in very little time.

I haven’t had a chance to fully play with the overclocking options, but based on previous experience, this board will make it easy to dial in a fast and stable overclock. A few notes about the cons I have with this board.

1. On the standard ATX version of this board, the USB 3. x header is right-angled, while this one is not which made cable management a little more difficult due to the terrible front-panel connectors and thick cables used in most computer cases.

Not sure why this was changed to a vertical connector for the mATX version. 2. There’s no heatsink included for the second M. 2 slot nor is there any way to actually mount one if MSI sold them separately.

This is likely because it would interfere with one of the PCIe 1x slots. 3. Not sure how much control MSI really has on this, but the PCIe slot arrangement could be better. Most enthusiast video cards will likely cover the first PCIe 1x slot.

Also, since the second PCIe 8x slot is only one slot away from the first PCIe 16x slot, your SLI/Crossfire video card options are limited to cards that are only 2-slot style. My 2080Ti is 3-slot (2. 75 technically), which covers the PCIe 8x slot.

Maybe they could go an arrangement like: – PCIe 16x – M. 2 slot (with no PCIe 1x) – PCIe 1x – PCIe8x? 4. It was not super clear whether the Sys_Fan headers are DC mode only or if they support PWM fans.

The manual implies that they’re DC mode only, but they use 4-pin headers which are used for PWM. I know the list of cons looks huge, but they really didn’t have much of an impact on the build I did with this board.

I’m super happy with how this board works and how my build turned out.