Nice review but too bad this product costs a small fortune. Though I'm pretty happy with it's younger brother M5.

It is a nice looking board and with the water cooling options it is meant for high end systems. I am glad to see that they addressed the ugly WiFi adapter chip by encasing it in a nice looking shroud while also standing it up, it's just a shame that they didn't do the same with the ITX GAMING Z170I PRO AC... but maybe they will with the usual ACX update down the line?

The backplate does look nice but I foresee people trying to cram in their CPU coolers only to find out that they won't fit anymore... Awesome and extremely detailed review, thanks boss!

Hilbert, can you please confirm whether this mobo has support for HDCP 2.2 output via DP or HDMI? I'm having a difficult time finding a list of boards with confirmed 2.2 support.

HDCP is not tied to your motherboard, but controlled by the video processor (either inside the CPU or dedicated graphics card). If you use Skylake then no, from the top of my head HDCP 2.2 is not supported.

Nice review, but hard to imagine much of a market for this...I imagine thinking about a case for this thing might be a challenge...;) The only reason to see a dolled-up motherboard like this is to run it in an open platform, like G3d's test benches...the UEFI layout is ~90% a match for my AMD UEFI setup at home...~$500 (dollars--don't know what the Euro exchange rate is atm) seems far too steep... The Killer NIC is fine (mine is the E2205)...although I'd like to know why MSI switched from RealTek to Killer as Gb NICs seem pretty much a wash in terms of performance...I think people dislike the "Killer" moniker because it implies that your NIC can speed up the Internet...;)...it's just marketing...Remember when Intel claimed its cpus could speed up the Internet...?...;)

please use an m.2 3.0x4 For the m.2 benchmarks, please use a model with 32Gbps speed instead of a 10Gbps so we can see the actual performance. Thank you. Perhaps a Samsung SM951

Sure purchase me one and I'll do that for you, thank you.