MSI XL ATX DDR3 2600 LGA 1150 Motherboards Z97 XPOWER AC

This is an awesome board. Plenty of room for expansion boards. Runs cool, even overclocked to 4GHz.Some gripes though.1. At this price point there should have been dual nics.2. ASMedia controller SATA ports 7-10 can not be made hot-swap. Inconvenient when you have removable drive trays.3. Don't use ASMedia driver supplied. Use Microsoft standard SATA driver.4. WiFi and Bluetooth should be left to third party vendors, lowering the motherboard price.Remember if these go bad, the entire board has to be RMA'd.I don't use Bluetooth and my router has WiFi.I have no way of knowing if these included devices even work.

Bad Quality Control for a "military spec" board (people died!). Bad RMA (5-15 days turnaround eventhough they will send you a refurbished one anyway). Buy it and it's faulty, stuck with it...not worth the ridiculous price tag, plus RMA fees, plus time without a working computer if the one that arrives it doesn't work.

After about 5 weeks of use certain applications stopped running or would not launch, specifically all 3D games and some web applications, then it started to crash often. I've contacted MSI tech support and they answer the phone quickly and engage, however after two weeks of debugging, the issue is still not resolved. This was initial diagnosed as a graphics card issue, but I recently had a fail after the graphics card was removed while using the onboard video, so this may be a motherboard failure after all.I'm a bit grumpy that this isn't resolved after spending a lot of money on my new rig, but sometimes this happens and an early life fail typically is fairly low, but I just got some bad luck. Unfortunately, this was outside the windows of Amazon returns so I'm working through MSI support which does not have a cross ship program or you may need to wait for stock to ship. I will update this review after I get my rig working with the latest status. Depending on how things go, I'll upgrade the stars to 4 or 5.

No update for bios in bios menu via internet, pci-e could easily break if you are not careful... if you don't care then this board is for you.

The motherboard is excellent.Only 1 problem. That WiFi card is a mission to install. (On a scale of 0 to 10) Level of Complexity: 9.At first, I thought i broke the WiFi card, but only to check it about 8 times, to be sure, i ended up on:http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2360974/msi-z97-mpower-max.htmlOnly to find out I wasn't the only 1 who experienced this problem. it's still not working in window 10, I have spent two days trying to get it right. & still not working. I know I will find a solution to this problem in the next 34 hours, right now i'm updating all the BIOS/driver software/utilites "Trust me I'm an Engineer!!!" :-)Beside that everything works exactly the way it should be. I have been OC'ing (Overclocking) the Motherboard (Mobo) using an SSD. Results = Blazing Fast!!!!I'm impressed!!! :-) :-) :-)I'm happy with 4.5GHz OC for now, although i have liquid cooling system. I wish to upgrade nitrogen cooling in future, on the same board.I built this PC specifically in preparation for my PhD in Machine Learning (hence such a powerful Mobo would be very helpful).If you're thinking twice about this board. Stop & just buy it... Make sure you don't break anything in the process, otherwise leave it to the experts.Reason for Editing:The package was slightly torn apart, & the WiFi card was defective/faulty (tested it for 20 days). I had to RMA the Motherboard only because of the WiFi card.

Been using the board about a month now, it's amazing!!!!Only con I have is you need to remember to hook up the wifi/Bluetooth before insalling the board I had to take my whole build apart because of this.

Really cool the way it lights up. Rock solid but the included adapter for the wireless internet and Bluetooth is way to difficult to install. Would have liked it to have been built into the MB.

Not the easiest to get working together, but once it is...WOW. Great customer service as well!