On the right side of the board, all connections are hidden under the metal covers and are thus forced to be right-angled. 6 SATA 6Gb/s ports, two USB 3.2 Gen1 5 Gbit/s ports, for 2 Type A each at the front panel, two USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 10 Gbit/s ports, one 6-pin PCIe connector for additional power supply of the PCIe slots and the usual 24-pin ATX connector. Fan and ARGB connections are of course also present in masses, but you can see that best in the diagram further down the page.
Really interesting on the top edge is only the right corner. Here you will find the postcode display, debug LEDs, as well as measuring points for the most important voltages. Next to it, there are two fan or pump connectors and the two 8-pin EPS connectors for the power supply of the CPU. Since these are positioned directly above the RAM slots, MSI was probably forced to use single-sided DIMM slot caps here. From my experience, these can cause problems with RAM-OC more often than conventional slots and can even damage the contacts on RAM modules in the worst case. So here special care is required when installing memory modules.
On the lower edge of the board, we find all the ports you could want across the entire width. Besides internal audio, RGB, ARGB, fans, pumps, flow and temperature sensors, 4 internal USB 2.0 ports can also be connected here. Further to the right are the on-board buttons for power and reset, as well as several toggle switches for selecting the BIOS, deactivating the RGB lighting and the M-Vision display. Lots of jumpers for LN2 Mode, Slow Mode and Safe Boot are also available and even the possibility to connect and use the MSI OC Dashboard from Unify-X boards.
Now it would only have been cooler if MSI had included an OC dashboard with the Z790 Godlike in addition to the M-Vision display, giving the user the choice between a fancy display and a functional remote control. By the way, I won’t test the former here since the MSI Center software is required and I’ve had very bad experiences with it in the past. And if we are honest, a resistive touch display should not be a reason to buy a motherboard in the 4-digit euro range in 2022 anyway.
In addition to the following teardown, the corresponding page from the manual is very well suited to understand the mass of hidden M.2 slots. M2_1 directly below the CPU is special here, since it uses dedicated PCIe lanes directly from the CPU and thus does not have to share its bandwidth with any other components. This slot should therefore be used primarily, even if it is only connected with PCIe 4.0.
The only other M.2 slot with a direct connection to the CPU is M2_4 on the bottom left. This is even connected to PCIe 5.0, but shares its connection with the PCI_E2 x16 slot above it, so only one of the two slots can be used at a time. However, this also means that the upper PCI_E1 slot for the graphics card can then only be operated with PCIe 5.0 x8. In addition, there are no other PCIe slots besides the two x16s, so you always have to steal lanes from the GPU when using a capture card or similar, for example. To my mind, this is a noteworthy drawback of this motherboard layout.
The space where you would normally find PCIe x4 slots is completely covered with M.2 slots, which are all connected via the Z790 chipset. M2_3 can also optionally run an mSATA SSD and M2_5 is the only slot with PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, which also deactivates 2-4 SATA ports when in use and depending on the type of SSD installed. In total, the Z790 Godlike then has seven M.2 slots, although you obviously have to make some concessions in terms of simultaneous use or bandwidth due to the Z790 platform.
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