It’s a really nice motherboard design and while the B-series motherboards are effectively the more affordable cut-down solution compared to the more premium Z-series motherboards, you wouldn’t really know from looking at it. This is a fantastic-looking bit of hardware, that looks every bit as premium as you could hope for. There are huge heatsinks on the VRM both at the top of the motherboard and on the left of the CPU, with the left being extended by an aluminium cover that shields the back of the I/O.
The CPU is fed by an 8+1+1 Direct Phase power design, with 90A chokes, so boosting the more high-end CPUs shouldn’t be a problem, and as above, those VRM heatsinks look pretty competent too.
The CPU is fed by a single 8-pin header, plus, there’s a good selection of fan headers, RGB headers and all the usual stuff dotted around the outside of the motherboard too.
The heatsink design is excellent, with a lightly textured aluminium finish giving them a matte look, but there’s a cool art design printed onto it too, giving it a bit of extra flair that’s sure to look great in any system.
Lucky the Dragon really does make for a fantastic logo.
The lower heatsink is a good size, covering both the chipset and the primary M.2 mount. It’s MSI’s Lightning Gen 4 x4 M.2 design, and their latest Shield Frozr heatsink, both designed to ensure the best performance from your SSD.
Obviously, being mini-ITX you only get a single PCI-E slot, but here it’s PCIe 5.0 which can take advantage of the latest (and future) GPU and storage devices.
This motherboard supports DDR5 memory of up to 7200+ (OC) MHz, so you can expect some pretty impressive memory performance overall. However, if that’s not for you, there’s a DDR4 version of the board too, just make sure you order the right version!
Finally, the rear of the motherboard offers up an additional M.2 mount.
The rear I/O is surprisingly well equipped, with four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports at the top, a USB Type-C 10Gb, a Turbo USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, and a pair of USB 2.0 ports; more than enough to hook up all your peripherals and external storage devices! There’s both 2.5 GbE LAN and the latest WiFi 6E too, so networking is going to be very fast! For added connectivity though, you also get both HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort.
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