MSI MEG Z390 GODLIKE
More glitz than the Vegas Strip
WE’VE SPOKEN A LOT about manufacturers turning away from gaming motifs, jazzy lights, and pointy angles in favor of sleeker designs, a more premium feel, and a better quality of product. It’s something we’ve been requesting for ages. You can tell us that RGB sells, but we think good design sells better.
MSI’s MEG Z390 Godlike didn’t seem to catch that memo. The layer of over-thetop glam adorning this bulky E-ATX beast was enough to make even our experienced selves take a step back, aghast. From the LED-dotted infinity mirror on the rear I/O cover to the vertically aligned OLED display, showcasing the MSI dragon beating the crap out of some ninjas on startup, to the huge drake motif on the bottom chipset perpetually glowing with rainbow lighting, everything about this screams gauche. There’s no subtlety at all. That touch of class we find from the likes of Asus is absent. You could argue, of course, that there’s a hole in the market— after all, we don’t want every mobo to look like an Asus motherboard—but it’s as though MSI saw the latest Formula, and said, “We want that, but x10.”
Which leads us to the slight niggle that is performance. Or lack thereof. We get it: Auto-overclocking processors, especially ones as toasty as Intel’s Core i7-8700K, isn’t a good thing, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of that extra performance. Compare this to the Hero, and you lose out by 100 points in Cinebench, nearly 4fps in X264, 10 seconds in Fry Render, and 2ns in memory latency at stock. Power draw is much lower here, with a 26W saving compared to the Hero, but it’s not enough for us to start raving about it.
This is meant to be MSI’s best and brightest componentry baked into a fine backbone of a mobo, but we’re just not seeing it. Take the power delivery: We’re talking twin eight-pin EPS, sitting alongside an 18-phase VRM design (which is actually a 16-phase design in reality). Sounds great on paper, but how does it translate to overclocking? Well, our minimum 5.0GHz stability benchmark test achieved a mundane 1.29V versus the Hero’s 1.22, and the maximum overclock we managed was 0.1GHz lower than anything we’d achieved prior. Perhaps it’s down to Asus supporting a stronger BIOS than MSI, but there really isn’t a lot here to warrant much in the way of compliments.
There must be some positives, surely? Well, connectivity is extensively supported. There are three M.2 slots, with dedicated heatsinks, two internal USB 3.1 headers, two USB 3.0 headers, six SATA 6Gb/s, one U.2 connection port (for the 0.001 percent of the market with a device capable of plugging into it), and two USB 2.0 headers. You also get nine PWM fan headers, one AIO pump header, and a waterflow header. There are three
RGB headers on the board, too, in case you read out. Plus, there’s our all-time favorite JFP1 unmarked header for your front panel connectors (yay!). The one saving grace is the fat audio solution, but there’s a lot of fluff here, and not a lot of substance. The rear I/O is seemingly empty in contrast.
Ultimately, MSI’s MEG Z390 Godlike mobo tries too hard to be something it’s not. The gaming motifs are tired, the LEDs are unnecessary, performance is acceptable at best, and the price is simply absurd. Even the dedicated audio isn’t enough to convince us of its value. That’s a shame, because MSI could be so much more than it is today—if only the company would take a step back, and try to establish exactly what its market should be. –ZAK STOREY