MSI MEG Z690 UNIFY Motherboard Preview

Motherboard Overview

This is one amazing looking motherboard, and while you can tell it’s high-end, you really have to look hard to see a lot of the finer details here. It’s a very toned down and muted design, with no big shiny mirror surfaces, it’s not riddled with chrome, and there are no big OLED/RGB panels here either. It’s more like something out of the bat cave, and I absolutely love it. It’s a pretty heavy motherboard too. There’s a significant amount of aluminium on the front of this board, providing shielding and some hefty heatsinks, but there’s also a full backplate, adding to the strength, but also to the overall weight.

Want to get the best out of the new Intel CPUs? You’ll certainly have no issues doing it with this motherboard. It has an impressive 19+2 Phase, running a 105A Smart Power Stage. This is all paired up with two enormous heatsinks, joined together with a thick heatpipe. The top heatsink is lower down, likely to prevent it from clashing with top-mounted radiators. However, the left heatsink is absolutely huge and finished with that stunning embossed dragon design.

Power comes from a pair of 8 pin PSU headers, which will help provide more stable voltages for overclocking. I’m surprised these aren’t armoured though, as other high-end boards of this calibre typically do.

In the top right, you’ll find a handy BIOS debug LED, which is always welcome.

Remember, Z690 can have either DDR4 or DDR5 slots, but they’re not forward/backwards compatible, so make sure you pick up the right ones! Given this is a higher-end board, it’s no surprise that MSI treated it to DDR5 though, and their MSI Memory Boost technology, so you should be able to get the best performance!

This board is one of the few that comes with two PCIe 5.0 x16 lanes, and while you can’t really take full advantage of that now, I’m sure we’ll see graphics cards and other devices taking advantage of the massively increased bandwidth in the near future. However, between those slots, you’ll also find a lot of removable heatsinks, providing room for up to five PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSDs; that’s a LOT of extremely fast storage!

There’s also a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot here too, should you need it, although given the board is so well equipped already, I can’t imagine what for!

The rear I/O really got my attention, as it’s the first Z690 I’ve seen with a PS2 port, most likely for the old-school overclockers out there who still love to use it. There’s also a pair of USB 2.0 ports, one of which is the BIOS flash port. However, the remaining eight USB slots are all USB 3.2 Gen 2, with the Type-C offering 2×2 20Gbps transfer speeds. Of course, networking is well taken care of too, with a pair of 2.5 GbE LAN ports, as well as the super-fast Intel WiFi 6. Finally, you also have gold-plated audio jacks, providing you with 8-channel audio.