Z270 Motherboard Preview Roundup

MSI

With MSI's Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon landing in our lab first, it's also the first board with a full review, which you can read here. We also used it in our CPU coverage to overclock the Core i7-7700K and Core i5-7600K. We've also got MSI's Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium waiting in the wings too, but these are just two of 14 new boards of mini-ITX, micro-ATX, and ATX flavours that MSI is launching today for the Z270 chipset.

Most of the information you can find below, but an interesting addition for some of MSI's Z270 lineup is a heatsink for M.2 SSDs. Called the M.2 Shield, it's a metal place lined with a thermal pad that attaches to one of the M.2 ports and helps to dissipate heat from the SSD. Thermal throttling isn't as much of a problem with the latest SSDs, with Samsung stating its 960 Pro can transfer over 300GB of data sequentially before the drive throttles. A lot will depend on the ambient temperature of course, but the M.2 Shield did actually make a significant improvement in temperatures in our testing: We recorded a 10°C drop during sequential read and write testing. What's more, MSI's boards performed the best in terms of M.2 speeds.

Mini-ITX

Micro-ATX


ATX