A Closer Look
The board looks fantastic, with a new darker design that’s basically black on black, giving it a much more aggressive yet understated look too. Of course, there’s not actually much motherboard to see, as it’s mostly covered in armour and heatsinks, which should certainly help with the overall performance too.
The main feature of this motherboard is that mighty 19+2 Phase configuration which comes with 105A Smart Power Stage, Titanium Choke III and those chunky heatsinks, which are paired together by a thick heatpipe too. When it comes to hitting max boost clocks on the new Intel CPUs, you shouldn’t have any trouble here.
It does look good though, and while not the most extreme configuration from MSI, it’s certainly one of the best ones on available for Z690 right now.
Power comes from a pair of 8-pin connectors, ensuring better power delivery and more stable voltages.
In the top right, there’s a handy BIOS debug LED, and quite a few fan connectors too, can never have too many of those!
While Z690 can use DDR4, MSI has stuck with DDR5 on all their high-end boards. This will support Dual Channel DDR5-6666MHz(OC) using the latest XMP 3.0 configurations and MSI Memory Boost. Of course, you’ll be able to push way past that with overclocking too.
The lower part of the board has a lot of heavy-duty armour and heatsinks. However, the top heatsink is the largest single M.2 cooler, with a double-sided Shield Frozr design for improved performance. Of course, there are four other M.2 mounts below that, two with their own heatsinks, then a full-width heatsink at the bottom that covers two mounts side by side. All support the latest PCI Gen4 with MSI Lightning Gen 4 enhancements.
PCIe 4.0 for storage is great, but you’re future proof for expansion cards too. There are two PCIe x16 PCIe 5.0 slots, which use the more robust SMT(Surface Mount Technology) armour design.
Six SATA ports are included, should you have some regular SSDs or even HDDs to hook up.
Built-in power controls and a BIOS switch, which are always welcome when working on a test bench or overclocking.
Even more fan headers along the bottom here.
The Audio Boost 5 hardware user the latest ALC4080 processor & amp which can playback 32-bit/192kHz to 32-bit/384kHz, Chemicon gold audio capacitors, and enough power for headphones up to 600 ohms.
The rear I/O is packed with great features too, with a BIOS flash port, and even the old-school PS2 port, which should please the old-school overclockers out there. There are two 2.5 GbE LAN ports, as well as WiFi 6, so you won’t be short of networking options here. However, you also get 7 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps ports, and a Type-C 2×2, offering up to 20Gbps.
