The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – All Z590 XOC mainboards in one big roundup

1 - Introduction and preface 2 - Asus Maximus XIII Apex 3 - ASRock Z590 OC Formula 4 - EVGA Z590 Dark 5 - Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Tachyon 6 - MSI MEG Z590 Unify-X 7 - Closing Thoughts

MSI MEG Z590 Unify-X

MSI’s Unify-X series hasn’t been around as long as some other manufacturers, but it has already established itself as a cost-efficient insider tip in the community. A well-known example is the B550 Unify-X for AMD Ryzen CPUs, which can cost-effectively extract peak performance from CPU and RAM like no other board, albeit plagued by some teething problems.

I also approached the test of the Z590 variant with a corresponding expectation. It’s welcome to be cheap and a bit cumbersome to use, as long as in the end the performance can keep up with the competition. Well, those who have read my full review already know that this is unfortunately not the case in most situations. Instead of putting on-board buttons for Retry, Safe Boot and BCLK Plus and Minus on the board, MSI has decided to outsource them to some sort of wired remote. This has never worked for me and many other users also complain in forum posts about only partially working buttons.

It may well be that my sample was a product from a bad batch and that the problem could be solved simply by a replacement part. And indeed, after brief clarification with support, a supposed defect in the tuning controller was confirmed and a replacement part ordered. That was at the end of October and 6 weeks later the replacement part has unfortunately still not arrived. I understand the limitations of global logistics, but after such a long wait, I would have initiated an exchange of the whole board long ago as a normal paying customer if the main reason for the purchase had been the OC features.

Now I bought my sample myself, but also decided to keep it because of today’s article and for further testing in the future with possible BIOS updates. Unfortunately, nothing has happened here either since the review so far. And one more negative point I have to bring up: the in-OS software. These are available in the form of MSI Command Center Light for voltages and multipliers and MSI Dragon Ball for RAM timings, but could not be found in a version compatible with the board. It was only through Igor’s press contact at MSI that we were provided with an internal build that actually worked with the board. So again, the experience for end users is modest.

Now the board also has positive sides, which I do not want to let fall under the table. The power supply with 8 doubled phases and 90 A Smart Power Stages is on the same level as the other Z590 XOC boards, the cooling of which is completely passive and the design of the board is for me the most simple and elegant of all. No RGB, just black matte and gloss finishes with a few silver flecks where it can’t be avoided – I personally like it a lot.

The BIOS is also an extremely positive point with its layout and organization. The menus make sense, all the settings are where you’d expect them to be and there are all the memory training options you could want, even a distinction between Command Rate “1N” and “Real 1N”. Together with the search function and the pop-up that always shows all changed effective clock rates when the BCLK is changed, the BIOS is really almost perfect.

Now we still need to talk about RAM compatibility and there, unfortunately, the situation is also quite modest in terms of high clock support, with the exception of single-ranked Samsung 8 Gbit B-Die. For just such RAM modules, MSI seems to have put a lot of work and effort into optimizing it so that it can even keep up with the fastest of the other boards and even undercut them on timings. But that’s it, dual-rank Samsung B-Die, Micron Rev B, Hynix DJR etc. unfortunately run several hundred Mbps slower than on the other Z590 XOC boards.

MSI’s Z590 Unify-X is also not an overclocking motherboard in my opinion. It can do some things just too badly for that, or not at all. But the things it can do, like single-rank B-Die, structuring the BIOS or the impressively simple design, the board does better than any other. You might think MSI’s motto when designing each feature was “all or nothing”. At least that’s what it feels like. In addition, the MSI Z590 Unify-X is also the cheapest of the 5 boards, which somewhat alleviates the disappointment when some features are omitted.

Bottom line, the Z590 Unify-X is more of a gaming board, with plenty of IO that also happens to overclock single-rank B-Die very well. There is no award for this, but neither is a “fail”. Hopefully MSI really finishes developing the successor of all features. Because then it could become a real price-performance secret tip again.