MSI Meg X299 Creation LGA 2066 E-ATX Motherboard

Stay as far away from this Motherboard as possible.

This motherboard is one of the worst motherboards i have ever had to deal with. Cons: Design flaws The board had 3 ATX/EPS 8pin power connectors, their location is directly behind/against one the heatsinks on the motherboard making it very difficult with some cases to get them inserted. PICe supplmental Power. A molex connector on this board was placed at Right angle on the bottom edge (bottom edge referring to the bottom when in a horizontal... Show More position in a typical tower case. The problem here is almost NO case is designed to have enough space to deal with this setup for a EATX motherboard. If it had been placed in a normal vertical position then it would not have been as much of a problem however in angle *pointing downwards* position makes it nearly useless. Flawed bios: Due to some sort of serious flaw with the bios installing almost any windows 10 Operating system results in a failed install. I spent 8 hours trying to fix this issue there is no help from the MSI website and their techsupport keeps banker hours making getting in contact with them difficult. Email forms went unanswered. I finally stumbled across the solution. You have to go into the bios under advanced settings and DISABLE hyper threading. Considering the target audience of this board losing hyper-threading is a very serious problem. Since ONLY the MSI Creation x299 Board suffers this flaw it is some MSI unique problem. Additionally, their x399 threadripper variants of the same board have similar problem. You can re-enable hyper threading after installing windows, applying all available updates AND installing the system board drivers from MSI. There is instruction on this, I just spent 3 days doing trial and error. Google searches revealed no solutions. Pros: I bought this board due to the availability of up to 7 m.2 NVMe drives. This is achieved through 3 on-board and a add-in card that can hold 4. However, the add-in card has very specific requirements including a mandatory x16 PCIe slot. w/o x16 NVMe drives will not be detected or available. Due to this req. you lose a lot of expand ability in other areas. It also comes with a Thunderbolt add-in card but is almost useless. If you need to install ANY other card then u can't use the thunderbolt card, as the GPU uses x16, M.2 uses x16. 3rd card, in my case a 10gb Lan card using x4, uses up nearly all the pcie lanes and adding a 4th card changes the slots to x8 disabling the m.2 expander card. One final nail in the coffin on this expander card is that it is a Dual slot Extra Tall card. The height creates problems in many builds and is completely un-needed. They add a large heat-sink and fan which could be useful but is over engineered creating it's own problems. The m.2 card is about the size of a small dual slot GPU and even requires it's own pcie 6pin power. Lastly the motherboard uses unique software from MSI designed specifically for it. This software will conflict with any other software that attempts to use motherboard features. I got a Corsair Commander Pro, and 9 LL120 fans, and 8x8gb Corsair PRO RGB Ram. The ram RGB should be disabled if you have ram with RGB due to extreme high heat generation. Idle ram w/o RGB is around 30c, with RGB on, over 50c plus heating up the rest of hte case, requiring you to have a lot of case fan noise to keep temperatures reasonable. I have 30 years of PC building background and have never seen such a collection of problems in one motherboard.Show Less

Reviewed on B&H Photo Video