MSI X99A GODLIKE Gaming Motherboard Review - Product Showcase

X99 will bring a whopping 10-port SATA 6 Gb/s storage controller supporting RAID RST and SRT and SSD TRIM on RAID 0 configurations. SATA Express is supported. Interesting to see is the M.2. PCI Express slot, this received an upgrade from 1x PCI Express lane towards x4, giving the port not 10 GB/sec but 32 GB/sec performance! Mind you that it is a shared slot, so if you use M.2. then SATA port 5 and 6 will render themselves inactive as M.2. uses these.

You will receive an integrated Killer series 1535 WIFI module in this kit. This unit will offer you support of 802.11 ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 and Miracast. With a proper router you can achieve 867 Mbps, which is exactly what we connected with (we'll demo that later on). Make note of all the USB lovin' you will receive. There are 6x USB 3.1 ports available though internal connectors motherboard connectors delivered by the Intel and Asmedia controllers. 

MSI will deliver power and reset buttons on-board. There are voltage monitoring points as well so that you can monitor critical control points with a Digital multi-meter. V-Check points revision 2 supports up to 3 multimeters at once for monitoring of voltages. The OC genie button will allow for a small default overclock. 

The board comes with diagnostic LEDs and voltage measurement points. You will get eight DIMM slots offer support for quad-channel DDR4 memory up to even 3400 MHz (OC). You can install a maximum of 128 GB in total. XMP 2.0 must be supported, we'll show you this petite setup running at 2133 / 2400 MHz.

MSI applied their Military Class V components on the motherboard with updated DrMOS MosFETs and aluminum colored dark caps that are not only going to increase the motherboards lifespan, they look magnificent on this motherboard as well.  BTW the board has a dual-bios, if you screw up an update or whatever, flock a micro-switch on the PCB and you will be booting again from your fail-save BIOS. A LED on the POCB will indicate which BIOS is active.
 

To the right you can see a Diagnostic post LED, it will display the status/post code. Once you have booted into Windows it will display the package temperature of your processor.