MSI MEG Z690 GODLIKE Motherboard Review

How Much Does it Cost?

$2,099 or roughly £1,800 but expect it to be a little more than that since it’s only a rough conversion. Yep, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it really is that expensive.

Added Value

For that eye-watering price, it at least comes with a selection of high-value extras, including the AIO liquid cooler that comes in at $280 or £250 and the Kingston DDR5 memory that comes in at $312 or £236 at its lowest recorded price. Of course, it also comes with the necklace and the included test bench, but we will come onto that.

Build Quality & Design

Most of the board feels very well designed and with amazing quality. It uses obviously good quality materials and has clear thought put behind most of its features and layout. But unfortunately, as you might have realised from my choice of words, there is a fatal flaw in the design that we have found during testing.

The problem has three different ways of happening. The first is the M.2 heat sink that extends across the bottom of the board, screwing either side of it down less than half a millimetre too far presses and holds the power and reset buttons down because the buttons are small switches on the motherboard that has a plastic cover that you press onto to press the buttons down, this plastic piece is a part of the M.2 heat sink.

The second way of making the issue happen is screwing the plate that sits on top of the M.2 heat sink a tiny bit too far by any of the four screws that are used to hold it down.

The third and final way that you can have this issue occur is by having a graphics card sitting on the plate, this also holds down the power and reset buttons. With the graphics card issue, we found that having the GPU be supported in the same way it would be in a case does hold it up enough for it to not press the buttons, but this comes with a test bench that has no support like this so which is quite insulting when this board has an issue like this.

To be clear I’m not suggesting that the motherboard needs to come with a more robust and fully featured test bench, I am suggesting that if you are going to include a test bench then make sure you don’t have such a preventable issue like this. For a board of this cost, it is frankly ridiculous that an issue like this could make it all the way through the design, testing and manufacturing process without being caught along the way by someone.

Performance

When we evaluate the board’s performance we see middle of the road performance with average to below-average scores throughout testing with the occasional major win where it sits at the top of the leader board and the occasional major loss for the board when it sits at the very bottom of the leader board.

Overview

Overall the board looks very good, it feels very good, it performs in the middle of the road and is expensive. I’m afraid there isn’t much more to say on the matter. I get the impression that this board isn’t meant to be a consumer product and more like a collectable for MSI enthusiasts and Hardware collectors alike. With the design flaw with the power and reset buttons in mind it’s hard to say that this board feels worth its price tag, not even the M-Vision dashboard can help that feeling as I never used it, it doesn’t feel responsive and goes into idle faster than it loads things. To fix the M-Vision dashboard I would suggest making it an optional add-on that is compatible with MSI boards through an internal connector that let sit be used at any point like when it is a part of the board itself, but also make it a standard USB compatible device so you can use it on any system, this would also probably gain more sales than the board as a whole. Oh and fix the touch screen.

Should I Buy One?

To put it bluntly, you can’t. The MSI MEG Z690 GODLIKE has a limited quantity globally and is only available to select previously registered MSI customers. Ironically, this final nail in the coffin for the Godlike might be its saving grace, as there is no real way for it to be a commercial failure. So what’s my conclusion on the Godlike? Well, honestly, it doesn’t matter but I’m going to give you my opinion anyway; the MSI MEG Z690 GODLIKE is not worth the money in the slightest, to make it something worth buying they would need to take my advice on the M-Vision dashboard, remove the AIO and RAM from the box and bring the price way down, and maybe then it could also be made in higher numbers and could be actually obtainable for the average consumer who has a lot of spare cash to throw at an extravagant board like this.