Review: MSI MEG Z790 ACE

#6076498 Posted on: 11/25/2022 06:44 PM

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I really wanted this to include 10Gbe (chip shortage still?) but I decided to go with it anyways and dust off my Asus XG-100C for connecting to my servers. Only light gaming for me, this is for photo production since the 13900k has huge gains for editing work. Hopefully two sticks of 32GB memory will hit 6000. I didn't consider the placement of the aRGB connection but we'll see how things go in the 011 Dynamic XL.Cheers!

#6076700 Posted on: 11/26/2022 02:52 PM

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I'm sadly too late to warn you but my experience with the X670 version is horrible
it looks like MSI is ok good with Intel but not AMD, there's only 1 bios and it's completely broken, sending my very expensive MB RMA
- tried 3 kits of ddr5 g.skill doesn't work at all, corsair work but only at 4800..or 3600 with 4 sticks
- if I do any changes in the bios it won't boot
- saving changes in bios gives me a blank screen
- the bios freezes and crashes O_O
- have to clear cmos all the time as it seems to corrupt itself if you even enter the bios screen
- only 1 bios for it (2 for the Z790 but that's still very low the z790 tomahawk has 5 already 1/month this far since 08.2022)
- pbo doesn't work at all
- sometimes pbo activates itself alone but I never saw the desktop when it happens, crashes at win load

I'm doomed with motherboards Z690 was a nightmare this is worse
one thing for sure I will stay away from expensive motherboards, support is non existant for them, Linus from LTT gave that advice in a stream he was right

#6076788 Posted on: 11/26/2022 11:10 PM

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I'm sadly too late to warn you but my experience with the X670 version is horrible
it looks like MSI is ok good with Intel but not AMD, there's only 1 bios and it's completely broken, sending my very expensive MB RMA
- tried 3 kits of ddr5 g.skill doesn't work at all, corsair work but only at 4800..or 3600 with 4 sticks
- if I do any changes in the bios it won't boot
- saving changes in bios gives me a blank screen
- the bios freezes and crashes O_O
- have to clear cmos all the time as it seems to corrupt itself if you even enter the bios screen
- only 1 bios for it (2 for the Z790 but that's still very low the z790 tomahawk has 5 already 1/month this far since 08.2022)
- pbo doesn't work at all
- sometimes pbo activates itself alone but I never saw the desktop when it happens, crashes at win load

I'm doomed with motherboards Z690 was a nightmare this is worse
one thing for sure I will stay away from expensive motherboards, support is non existant for them, Linus from LTT gave that advice in a stream he was right


That's a solid point! The most popular board with the largest crowd will get the most updates. My current MSI Creator TRX40 board has been quite stable with DDR4 3200 but DDR5 is a totally new beast to tackle. Did you try running just two sticks of memory? It looks like DDR5-3600 is the max on AMD with four sticks. I went for the 2x 32GB kit and hoping to hit 6000 - F5-6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5NR. Luckily I have two PC's on rotation so I'll keep my current 3960x editing station until I can get the new build to be stable. My assistant is usually culling but can have the 13900k until the kinks are worked out. Speaking of bugs and such, I thought my 3960x was acting strange and finally ran DDU and went back to the NVIDA studio driver 517.40 really smoothed things out in Lightroom where it actually wasn't allowing me to use my GPU for processing. Did you start with a fresh install of Windows? I'm usually lazy and just slap my C: into the new build as is but in hindsight that was a bad idea.

#6076836 Posted on: 11/27/2022 10:09 AM

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MSI TRX40 was a dream come true for me, it's the 1st ever motherboard wysiwg (what you see is what you get) for me all the pcie slots ran properly with all m.2 all sata ports all rear usbs (I had a lot of external drives, replaced by a 10gbe server now) I ran 8x 3200mhz ddr4 fine and they abandoned us a shame
I'm one of the few people who has seen what happens when you run out of pcie lanes I had "not enough bandwith disconnect some usbs" from windows and "disappearing" pcie cards and or sata drives back then (when you run out of pcie lanes the motherboard stops seeing your pcie card or sata drives it's like it's not connectedand doesn't even show on bios the port is just gone)

i can confirm on AMD all you get is 3600Mhz with 4 sticks (that's for dual rank sticks but I don't know 16-32gbs sticks that aren't might be some)
2 sticks all that works for me is 4800Mhz anything else and it doesn't boot or crashes, the mouse cursor "stutters" or stops moving both in bios or windows if it boots
I have seen 6000Mhz boot but 1st cinebench R23 run was 32'000 so something obviously wrong and after a few benchmarks it crashed and refused to boot
as I said I plan to RMA the motherboard soon because lots of people had to rma their x670e meg ace (and my bios is clearly broken I can't change 1 setting or it stops booting) and depending on what they say might go 13900k I'm not brand loyal

I always reinstall from zero, in my case it's clearly either mb defect (likely) or a bios problem and there's only 1 this far, I tried 2 betas I found but they do the same

#6077423 Posted on: 11/29/2022 04:47 AM

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you either have pci lanes or you don't, there is no running out of them or disappearing of devices caused by any such thing.