MSI Z270 Krait Gaming LGA 1151 Motherboard Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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MSI Z270 Krait Gaming LGA 1151 Motherboard Review - While it is generally the flagship motherboards that grab the most attention, it's the midrange offerings that see the most sales. MSI's Z270 Krait Gaming motherboard is one of those bread and butter type offerings. It has everything the gamer needs without the unnecessary and expensive fluff.
 
Big fan of the highly functional, great value w/o bells and whistles. +1 to mid range! Thanks for not forgetting this segment; this is a board I can now recommend to budget minded builders which crave performance

The aesthetics of that board cut right to my core, or perhaps that was the massive talons which inspired this styling?
 
Very impressive showing by MSI! Thanks for putting in the time to give us another great review, [H]!
 
I saw the IO picture and thought to myself, "This thing has a serial port?!" Then I clicked on the image and was disappointed.
 
Was there any issues installing the kaby lake cpu? Some of the other boards require having a skylake installed before you can flash the bios to support kaby
 
Stability, performance without a lot of the bells and whistles equals one heck of a deal at $145. I would have to say that the MSI Z270 Krait Gaming will be my next motherboard. Sorry Asus. Haven't seen an offering from you all that matches or exceeds MSI's offering.
 
SpoogeMonkey said:
Was there any issues installing the kaby lake cpu? Some of the other boards require having a skylake installed before you can flash the bios to support kaby
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I've never seen a Z270 motherboard that required a Skylake CPU be installed before you could flash it. That shouldn't even be possible due to the fact that Z270 came out at the same time as Skylake motherboards and all Z270 motherboards should have UEFI BIOS support for Kaby Lake microcode. Furthermore, many motherboards on the market today from ASUS, MSI and GIGABYTE don't even require a CPU or RAM to be installed prior to flashing the BIOS. If we were talking about Z170, that could be an issue, but again you could just remove the CPU and RAM outright from some motherboards and flash them that way.

AceGoober said:
Stability, performance without a lot of the bells and whistles equals one heck of a deal at $145. I would have to say that the MSI Z270 Krait Gaming will be my next motherboard. Sorry Asus. Haven't seen an offering from you all that matches or exceeds MSI's offering.
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MSI has been on a roll lately.
 
RogueTadhg said:
I saw the IO picture and thought to myself, "This thing has a serial port?!" Then I clicked on the image and was disappointed.
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It does have a header for a serial port - and a parallel port if you need that too!

There's a lot to like about this board. I've been looking at a number of boards, and it seems that too many are putting the M.2 slot "below" the GPU slot. Most GPUs will be dumping their hot air directly on the SSD, and NVME drives are known to have problems with heat anyway! Nice to see they put the primary slot above the GPU slot!
 
MSI is my go-to these days. Have been really happy with their reliability and price point. I have the older Z97 Krait board right now and couldn't be happier with it.
 
A product that makes some sense! Their Z170A SLI was an excellent board and this one seems to follow in its' footsteps. Those ultra high boards with junk piled onto them just make so sense.
 
Looks like a great motherboard to upgrade to when the time arrives.

In the "Blender" test you state,
This is a new test for us so we only have the two data points. The Z270 Krait Gaming and Kaby Lake CPU simply dominate AMD’s Ryzen. (emphasis added)
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Since the Graph indicates "Lower is Better" and the Ryzen scored "45" and the Z270 "69" should the statement actually read,
AMD’s Ryzen simply dominates the Z270 Krait Gaming and Kaby Lake CPU.
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I always enjoy the [H] reviews.
 
Wow nice write-up! I'm loving the fact that you can get 5.0Ghz with ease with it. Not to mention the absence of all the other useless crap we can do without. Really nice!
 
Is this board just the Z270 SLI PLUS with a different color scheme? The layout and specs look exactly the same.
 
I completely agree with Dan's statement regarding MSI's boards lately. I have built a few systems recently and let me tell you, not just on quality, or quantity, MSI has honestly outshined many of my other usual choices for selecting a motherboard......... They are also providing an increasing amount of value for money.

The last purchase was the 170A SLI PLUS (i think rev 2)... It was like 120$ usd (about 159.99 CAD). It had a few quirks with setting up windows 7 but other than that wow.... extreme value and a great board for the price.
 
Newegg has a code for 15% off on some motherboards so I decided to upgrade my system even though I don't really need to.

It was between this and an ASUS board, and since I recently discovered how shitty ASUS's support is I was leaning toward the MSI, and this article put it over the top. I hope you guys didn't steer me wrong! lol
 
Haven't had an MSI board since, gosh I think it was called the K12?
anyway it was a long time ago, but it was very stable, this board would be a perfect fit for the kids with my 6700k..
Thanks for the review, great as always!
 
Chuklr said:
Looks like a great motherboard to upgrade to when the time arrives.

In the "Blender" test you state, Since the Graph indicates "Lower is Better" and the Ryzen scored "45" and the Z270 "69" should the statement actually read,

I always enjoy the [H] reviews.
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Thanks, I have that fixed, but it is not showing to the world yet. We moved our entire CMS to a fully new system this morning and are working out the bugs.
 
prime2515102 said:
I was wondering what was going on. Clicking on images lead to 'not found'. I had just switched DNS servers and thought the new server was at fault. I'm glad I didn't bother troubleshooting it. lol
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I am not showing any broken image links right now. Can you tell me which exact ones are broken? And please copy the link that it leads to.
 
prime2515102 said:
It's all good now, that was really early this morning (like 4 or 5am eastrern maybe?). And it was all the big images site-wide (big meaning, when you click a pic and the new window opens). The reviews section was completely empty too actually (I could search for them, but they didn't show up when using the menu).

But yeah, it's all good now. :)
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Cool, yeah, we were moving a bunch of stuff around about that time.
 
How are the llc options? My 45g gaming has none so I've been thinking of going to a new board. My 6700k only hits 4.5 and I thinking can do better.
 
Ghoststalker said:
How are the llc options? My 45g gaming has none so I've been thinking of going to a new board. My 6700k only hits 4.5 and I thinking can do better.
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It should be in one of the screen shots. I don't recall off hand as I didn't actually have to use it while overclocking. I look at those things on every motherboard but it was some time ago. There can be quite a bit of lead time between me looking at stuff like that and the actual publishing of the article.
 
I haven't been able to find this answer, but I have the X99A Sli Krait Edition and I can't find an explanation as to what "Krait" is.
 
Krait is a species of banded snakes. Their snake theme seems pretty overt.
 
I am looking to build a new system with my son and you just got me off on the right foot.

Obviously I don't post here often, but I read daily. Thanks from a long time lurker for the work you do.
 
Drewis said:
I completely agree with Dan's statement regarding MSI's boards lately. I have built a few systems recently and let me tell you, not just on quality, or quantity, MSI has honestly outshined many of my other usual choices for selecting a motherboard......... They are also providing an increasing amount of value for money.

The last purchase was the 170A SLI PLUS (i think rev 2)... It was like 120$ usd (about 159.99 CAD). It had a few quirks with setting up windows 7 but other than that wow.... extreme value and a great board for the price.
Click to expand...

I had an issue where i could not install win 7 on a Samsung 950 PRO M.2 SSD. Had to install win7 on a spare ssd, install samsung driver (because they could not be extracted from the installer package), export samsung driver with a third party utility, use the msi utility to modify the win7 iso and finally slipstream the samsung driver into windows 7.
 
Late to the party, but wanted to thank [H] for recommending this board. Upgraded to it and an i7-7700k, yesterday. Easy installation and everything runs smoothly. (y)

I know it's not the latest and greatest, but it's plenty powerful for my gaming and work stuff.
 
Commander Shepard said:
Late to the party, but wanted to thank [H] for recommending this board. Upgraded to it and an i7-7700k, yesterday. Easy installation and everything runs smoothly. (y)

I know it's not the latest and greatest, but it's plenty powerful for my gaming and work stuff.
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If anything goes south on my current setup, that's the exact combo I'll end up buying, too.
 
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