MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi Gaming Motherboard (AMD Ryzen 9000/8000/7000 Series Processors, AM5, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, M.2 Gen5, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 40Gbps, HDMI/DP, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, 5Gbps LAN, ATX)

This is a quality motherboard that comes at an ultra-premium cost. The PCIe 5.0 lanes are sensibly laid out, allowing for many M.2 NVME drives without eating into the GPU's PCIe lanes. I've had no issues getting the my Crucial T705 to negotiate as gen 5 in the M.2_1 slot. I'm upgrading from an ASUS ROG x670e Crosshair EXTREME, and the GODLIKE's expander board is much better than ASUS's offering on their premium motherboard. The GODLIKE's expander allows you to change NVME drives from outside the case (sorry, no hot-swapping). I was able to install it into PCI_E3 so that it does not take away any lanes from my GPU (though in this configuration it can only support having one of its M.2 slots active). My only complaint is that the fan on the expander just ramps to full speed right away and is unnecessarily loud.I really enjoyed the EZ Link design. It really made everything more clear and centralized over the x670e Crosshairs Extreme. The EZ Control Hub was also one of the more easy to deal with hubs. It makes sense to hide away most of the fan and RGB connections in the back of the case. I was building in a Cooler Master HAF Evo 700 and the fan and RGB hubs the case came with really made how comparatively easy the EZ Control Hub was to use apparent. The great thing about that hub is that it lets you set the fan curves in BIOS without needing to use third-party software in Windows.All the DIY niceties like the magnetic covers on unneeded ports, M.2 heatsinks, the EZ-Clip for putting in NVME drives, are all great. It is all very thoughtful and almost makes you feel like you're having a luxury PC-building experience.I've been getting some great PBO/CO results so I'm sure the VRM-supplied power and stability of the motherboard is good, but I did not A/B test it against any other board or anything.The two included temperature probes are useful. I nestled one into the cables coming from my 12VHPWR connector in order to detect any overheating situation before the connector starts melting. The other one I'm using for case ambient.I believe you can actually use them to control the fans in the motherboard settings, so that can be really useful for tuning an ideal quiet but functional cooling setup.The LCD display (Dynamic Dashboard III) is good. There's a decent amount of customization you can do once you use their software.The only significant flaw for myself is that I could not get Device Encryption to work on Windows 11. I could not get it to work on the x670e Crosshair EXTREME either. I get the same error: BitLocker cannot use Secure Boot for integrity because the expected TCG Log separator entry is missing or invalid. I suspect it's the same BIOS problem as the x670e Crosshair EXTREME and that the TCG log in PCR7 was not correctly written by their UEFI implementation.

PC Build:New components:MSI MPG X870E Carbon Gaming MotherboardAMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU 4.5 GHzG Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 6400 MT/s RAM (2 x 48 GB)Samsung 990 Pro Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSD (2 TB)Components from previous PC build:Corsair iCUE H100i LCD AIO CPU coolerNVidia RTX 3090 FE GPUSamsung 970 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD (512 GB)--windows boot driveSamsung 870 EVO SATA SSD (2 TB)Seagate 7200 RPM SATA HDD (3 TB)EVGA Supernova 1000 G2 1000 W PSU (80 Gold Rated)Was looking to upgrade my PC build this year to enable support for a transition to Windows 11 later this year, and also wanted to add additional RAM to allow me to take advantage of the full 24 GB of VRAM from my 3090 in 3D modeling programs. Initially I tried an ASUS X670E-E motherboard with the Ryzen 9 7950x and 128 GB of DDR5 6400 RAM (4 x 32 GB), but upon attempting to overclock the RAM to 6400 MHz the motherboard failed, and possibly damaged/blew out the CPU and RAM (I got a second X670 motherboard and put the questionable CPU and RAM in it and it failed to power up). Returned the motherboard and RAM and initiated a RMA of the CPU with AMD. Further research indicated that X870 motherboards are more robust and supportive of large memory configurations so I decided to go with the MSI X870E board as a replacement along with only running 2 DIMMs or RAM instead of 4. The MSI website showed that the motherboard, CPU and RAM combination I list above were officially supported so I ordered the new board and RAM, which arrived along with the replacement CPU from AMD.Installing all the new components and bringing over the legacy components from my previous PC was pretty straightforward--I particularly like the ease of installing the NVMe drives in the M.2 ports with the new pin connectors (I used the #3 and #4 M.2 ports on the board since I don't have a Gen5 NVMe drive--this allows me the option to add a Gen5 NVMe SSD into the #1 M.2 port down the road). The system powered up successfully and posted straight to BIOS. I flashed the latest BIOS version and went about setting up my CPU and RAM settings--I did run into a slight problem where a reboot after making BIOS changes would result in the system posting to idle but there being no video output either from my GPU or the iGPU from the Ryzen CPU. Powering down and restarting the system would restore video output. Once I was able to get to Windows and perform a clean Windows 10 install on my system along with installing all the latest drivers, this problem went away, so there may be a slight issue with whatever default display driver is being used prior to Windows install.I have been running the new system for a week now with no issues--the RAM posted instantly and turning on XEMP in the BIOS allowed it to overclock to 6400 MHz with no problems. I have also enabled Precision Boost Overdrive in the BIOS on the CPU with a thermal limit of 75 C and the CPU currently idles at 45-50 C and ramps up to 70-75 C under load as I would expect it to perform. Monitoring the CPU clock frequency in MSI Afterburner I see it is able to overclock the CPU up to 5.5 GHz in games, which has led to a nice performance boost from the new hardware. The extra RAM now allows me to utilize all of the available VRAM from my 3090 on 3D modelling software--scenes requiring 23 GB of VRAM now take up 70-75 GB of RAM which gives me plenty of headroom to work with in the software. Overall I am well pleased with the performance of this board--I have not tried to use the USB-C or USB 4.0 ports on the back of board nor the Wifi 7 capability (which I understand is only supported by Windows 11 at the moment), but it is nice to know they are there if I should need them in the future.