Packaging And Accessories
The front of the packaging proudly displays MSI’s Gaming Dragon as well as the Wireless AC support which is of course how this motherboard gets AC in its name.
The back has the usual key-features/marketing-material. If you are interested in seeing more you can find identical information on the product page right here.
There’s quite a bit included with the motherboard. The first part of the bundle includes some documentation, a case badge sticker and a door hanger.
Next we have driver/utility DVDs, two SATA III 6Gbps right angled cables, two WiFi Antennae and a padded rear I/O. In the manual it says MSI’s “M Connector” is an optional extra and not included as standard. In case you didn’t know the MSI M Connector allows you to plug all your front panel cables into it before then attaching it to your motherboard in one piece. I think this definitely should have been included as standard, as it’s not exactly an expensive piece of kit to make!
I recently cobbled a mini ITX system together for myself with spare parts I had lying about some of which included a Bitfenix Prodigy case, a MSI R9 290 GFX, i5 4670K CPU and an Asus Z87 Gryphon mobo, a reasonably decent gaming build you’ll agree. While everything worked fine (it was a pain in the ass to hide the full length PSU cables) it all ran far too hot for my liking especially the GFX which reached a toasty and cacophonous 92 deg under testing. Needless to say I disassembled it, packed everything away in their boxes again and returned to my tried and tested ATX system. Mini ITX makes sense in a lot of ways especially in the HTPC arena but it’s not everybody’s cuppa tea and definitely not mine, I’m a gamer at heart.
That’s more to do with the R9 290 being a hot card tbh… if you used GTX 780 you’;d get much better temps I think 😛
It is a very hot running card at the best of times made even worse in small enclosures, add that to the fact that my sample used a reference cooler. On an open test bench I recorded temps of ~ 83 deg. The temps could probably be improved a bit with a quality and correctly applied TIM. Don’t get me wrong, I like the mini ITX form factor but they have their limitations.
BTW. I liked the review. Thanks.
I agree the form factor is limited but what you can do with the form factor seems to be improving significantly every year…it wasn’t THAT long ago that we could only get Atom CPUs in the ITX form factor and the only cases that were available were hideous enterprise-style boxes. I think anyone building an ITX system from scratch (and out of their own money 😉 ) is likely to use an Nvidia card GTX 750Ti-GTX 780Ti depending on budget. And thanks, glad you liked it.
I run an i7-4770K, with the MSI Gaming AC Mini itx board and a EVGA GTX 760 w/ACX in a bitfenix. My temps are perfectly fine. I think its the R9 290. I’ve heard they run really hot
Amazing really, especially when you will learn it still has a fully fetched PCIe x16 slot, KillerNIC Gigabit Ethernet, WIFI, USB 3.0 and heck even four SATA 6 Gbps ports. To make things even tastier we pair it with a GeForce GTX 760 GAMING ITX graphics card, and the combo… well it’s just awesome. http://num.to/457-287-619-226