Edit: There are several valid criticisms of my review in the comments. Read them. They may help paint a less gloomy image of the product.

Edit: title should've said "building with this". But you can't change it. Ah well.

TL;DR 5/10. No immediate deal breakers like coil whine or anything like that, but MSI will fight you every step of the way.

It's a barely acceptable board, no more. No coil whine that I can detect so there's that.

Badly protected: The board's retail box is a cardboard box inside which there's a cardboard tray, and the board was actually loose in it in the Z ("height") axis. I could see where it had banged against the cardboard in transit. I'm all for eco-friendly packaging, but you still have to protect your product. It wasn't broken, but it could've been.

The VRM heatsink/I/O shield assembly is so large it interferes with the cooler (in my case, a Noctua NH-U12A). I'm lucky my Corsair Vengeance 5200 RAM was just low profile enough to rotate my cooler and overhang the RAM instead. And I do mean JUST low enough. It literally touches the fans.

If my RAM didn't have that flexibility, I would've had to accept a 1-2 mm air gap in the top of the cooler where the fan is blowing into nothing.

Also MSI put the front panel and HD audio headers on the far back of the board for some reason. And they're so close to the PCIe slot that I had to run the cables above it if I didn't want the cables to interfere with the graphics card. WHY?!

Most importantly, they were so close to the slot that the plastic sleeve that Cooler Master put on the connectors to fuse them into one (my case is an NR200) was interfering with my graphics card (EVGA RTX 3070 FTW3 Ultra Gaming)'s backplate and I had to remove the convenient sleeve and plug the tiny connectors in separately with tweezers. Not a good time.

Also there's only one case fan header, and it's on the bottom. That's the case for most Mini ITX boards, but it would certainly have been a saving grace if it had 2. The header in the bottom is just far enough that you need an extension on top of a splitter to use a Noctua fan in the top of the case, which is a lot of cables and connectors to shove between your CPU cooler and your RAM.

Edit: turns out, the only thing keeping you from using the CPU pump header as a fan header is the default fan curve. If you change the curve, you actually have two case fan headers. One in the top, one in the bottom. That actually negates a lot of the above paragraph. Thanks, commenters!

There are debug LEDs on the board. But they're in a spot where they're almost always going to be hidden by the CPU cooler unless maybe if you water-cool, and even then. They should've put them on their absolutely excessive VRM heatsinks or chipset fan instead. They're just bare metal and mostly a waste of space considering how massive they are.

The BIOS doesn't show a screen with shortcuts "press X for UEFI" at all by default, and if you ask it to, you'll see the screen for 0.5 second with no way to lengthen it. Realistically you'll be mashing the Del key that you googled because there's no way you can read it and the time allotted to press it is very short.

One good thing is that MSI Center is miles ahead of ASUS AI Suite. It doesn't feel like straight up bloatware. It works and the interface isn't completely stupid.

Fan curve adjustment works relatively well, except that you can't add/remove anchor points and that while dragging one, accidentally going out of bounds makes you "drop" the point, making it difficult to, say, adjust at which point the fan should reach 100%. It could certainly be improved, but it's the best Windows motherboard software I've seen so far.

Notably its auto fan adjustment tool refuses to set any case fan to less than 50%, ever, which gives a pretty loud result if you don't customize it.

Edit: So it turns out that MSI Center's fan control also kinda sucks after trying it for a few days. It would sometimes forget my custom curves for all fans, randomly, and any preset I set to the chipset fan would never survive reboot. And sometimes it would also lose control of the chipset fan entirely, allowing it to run at 100% for 10 seconds.

I wasn't aware that it was a thing initially, but just use Fan Control, an open source app that works a lot better.

I can't find AMD Eco Mode in the BIOS. It should be there, but you can only fiddle with advanced CPU settings to emulate it or use the single toggle in Ryzen Master that doesn't even tell you which target TDP you're using.

You can also ask Ryzen Master to automatically tune Eco Mode for you, but it doesn't say what that does apart from apparently running your CPU and fans at full blast for... 1 day, 7 hours??

Anyway, point is, Eco mode 105W/65W/etc. should be in the BIOS.

There seems to be no way to simply update the BIOS through the Internet like most modern motherboards have. You have to download a file to a FAT32 USB key and flash manually. The process feels very 2008.

Finally, I hoped that by now there would be BIOS updates to fix the issue where boot takes 40+ seconds to train memory but apparently not.

Edit, several months later: it took a very long time, but as of summer 2023, the issue was finally fixed with an AGESA update that mentioned something about memory.

5/10, would return and buy something else if the idea of starting my build over wasn't so daunting and if there were actually any other decent boards at reasonable prices.

But turns out, if you're building now, it's this or ASRock. Swallow the pain and deal with MSI's inconvenient stuff or wait and hope that Asus has a good offering soon.

Bonus: Pictures of my CPU cooler struggles

• I/O shield + VRM heatsink conflict

• Fan overhang

• Fan overhang, front view

• After rotating the cooler, it's resting on my RAM.