EVGA Z270 Classified or MSI Z270 Titanium

S

Slade

2[H]4U
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Jun 9, 2004
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Anyone have one of these boards? Pros/Cons from real world input would be nice.

So far a review with a random retail sample 7700k for the EVGA has yielded a 5.0ghz with little fuss but 5.0ghz speeds seem to be hit or miss at this point.

These seem to fit for what I want in the SATA connections, I've got at least 5 drives to connect + the m.2 for my OS drive.

EVGA Pros:
Seems like good construction quality of parts built for stability
Price is reasonable
4 + 4 setup so m.2 ports are dedicated while the other 4 sata is a marvell controller
Use of creative chip for sound (may or may not be pro but whatever)

Cons:
3600 max speed for RAM
First revision board (not saying much but at least the msi has a near 2 month head start on known bugs, problems)

MSI Pros:
6 SATA with m.2 shared (possible to do 2 m.2 with 4 sata available)
2 separate controller SATA (Marvell)
Heatsink cover for m.2
3866 mem speed

Cons:
less sata ports than evga
slightly lesser build than EVGA
costs more ($40~ give or take)
Realtek for sound (who cares about onboard these days TBH)
Silver ranking with the [H] review makes me feel meh about this board
 
Any reason for those particular boards? Not that I'm saying they are crap but just a little overpriced IMO. If all you need is ~8 SATA ports + 2 M.2 and 7700K @ 5GHz then something like an ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming K6 could easily do the job at half the cost (currently on sale at Newegg for $144).
 
Asus ROG all the way if you are looking for a high end board; EVGA's offerings are somewhat diluted post-X58 (Peter Tan used to work for them in their heyday, but he left to work for Asus before leaving the scene altogether). That being said they have the best support in the industry, whereas Asus has the worst.
 
Not touching ASRock boards. They are cheap for a reason. I wanted an Asus seeing that my last 4 builds have been asus and all of them were retired rather than dying for no reason. I've build a few asrock boards on the cheap and they died in mysterious ways. The X58 I'm on is a beast of a system that has had on time for 95% since Jan 2010; I've only shut it off for moving; power outages; upgrades. The downtime is basically < 1 week in 7 years. That's ASUS quality.
 
For me, I do not like both boards that you've mentioned. Although I do have to admit that EVGA's support is much better than MSI. I agree with bwang in that Asus' motherboards are much better compared to EVGA's and MSI's. I've had a bad experience with MSI boards as I had two defective Z170 Gaming M5 motherboards until I switched to the Asus Z170-A. It took some BIOS updates to make this stable, but after that, no problems whatsoever.
 
Went EVGA, guess I'll be first to try this out in this forum.
 
Slade said:
Not touching ASRock boards. They are cheap for a reason. I wanted an Asus seeing that my last 4 builds have been asus and all of them were retired rather than dying for no reason. I've build a few asrock boards on the cheap and they died in mysterious ways. The X58 I'm on is a beast of a system that has had on time for 95% since Jan 2010; I've only shut it off for moving; power outages; upgrades. The downtime is basically < 1 week in 7 years. That's ASUS quality.
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I've had very good luck with Asrock boards, but I have used the Fatality/Gaming lineup and not the extreme or cheaper versions. I also haven't used their higher end boards, just middle road ones. I've personally had more Asus boards that were bad, but I've also used many more Asus boards over the years as well so luck of the draw IMO.
 
Been working with the EVGA Z270 boards. It's a very decent board. Overclocking: fairly painless compared to previous builds. Set adaptive voltage, push offset to get to V you want, and set multiplier. Memory overclock. The board is limited to 3600mhz, but its fairly straightforward; XMP profile, select max speed of board 3600, tweak voltage. I found memory overclock pushed V to 1.37V and my mem was good for 3866 @ 1.35V Manually set to 1.34 and it did 1.352. close enough. Nothing different on the Z270 that you haven't read before for the past 2 intel CPU generation. AVX instructions are the pressure cooker portions and the mobo also has a AVX offset. I got away with 1 setting meaning 4.9 under AVX load and temps hitting 89C. Under everything else, max load temp is in the high 60's low 70s. Perfectly acceptable for a Kaby Lake. 30's for idle.

Features wise, 8 SATA ports are a nice touch. Legacy platter disks run well off the marvell controller, I think my Seagate 4TB does 133, the rest hover in the 100-133 range. M.2 drive was fairly painfree. Just required a tweak in the BIOS boot to enable it (set mode UEFI). Memory was a random Newegg pick for 3866mem. I got cheap and just picked the cheapest 3866 memory for drama free operation.

It has 6 USB ports on the back 3.0, a lightning and a usb c. It used an expansion bracket for 2 more on the backside. This board has some odd connectors on the bottom for supplementary PCI-E power and fan headers. Not a fan of them as in a less spacious mid tower, you may find yourself unable to use them.

RAID transfer was drama free. Set BIOS to raid mode for intel sata ports and had intel rapid storage installed. It was plug and play.

It has a red theme for the LED system, but I found that shutting it off made it look much better. I'm running white/black combo on the memory, 1080 card, so I put in some corsair fans with white accents on the casings and the h115 cooler with a white accent LED.
 
I have had terrible luck with Asus boards. My first one died after two years (P4C800 deluxe) and my Asus Sabertooth X99 that I have at the moment has been giving me all sorts of strange issues. In between these I had a Gigabyte X58 UD5 board that lasted for 6 years before giving me random restarts.

My step Father has just bought an MSI Z270 Carbon Pro so I will see how that board stacks up.

The problem with Asus boards is that if they do go wrong you could be in trouble as it's said that their support is bad.
 
Sorry to hear that. EVGA was the only manufacturer I've ever purchased a mobo from to have it arrive DOA. I'll probably never have another EVGA motheboard thanks to their questionable support.
 
Do both EVGA and MSI boards have Adaptive VCore settings? If you're OCing I think that is critical.

I'm pretty pissed my Gigabyte board lacks Adaptive Voltage settings.
 
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