How are MSI motherboards?

Firegod

Firegod

Firegod

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So I'm starting my AM5 build (yey) and I'm wanting to move away from Asus for the choice of motherboard. I'd like to try MSI, generally, how are their motherboards? I've no experience with them. :)

Do they get updates regularly? Are they stable? How is MSI software? Is the Bios feature rich and easy to use?

I'm looking to go with this board - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-mpg-b650-edge-wifi-socket-am5-ddr5-atx-motherboard-mb-373-ms.html

Good price, one gen 5 m.2 but not bothered about pcie5. Plenty usb ports. WiFi 6e means I can ditch my addin card. And most importantly for me it has spdif optical audio connector.

Cheers all.
 
Firegod said:
So I'm starting my AM5 build (yey) and I'm wanting to move away from Asus for the choice of motherboard. I'd like to try MSI, generally, how are their motherboards? I've no experience with them. :)

Do they get updates regularly? Are they stable? How is MSI software? Is the Bios feature rich and easy to use?

I'm looking to go with this board - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-mpg-b650-edge-wifi-socket-am5-ddr5-atx-motherboard-mb-373-ms.html

Good price, one gen 5 m.2 but not bothered about pcie5. Plenty usb ports. WiFi 6e means I can ditch my addin card. And most importantly for me it has spdif optical audio connector.

Cheers all.
Click to expand...

I rate mine. Im using a B650 Tomahawk,decent bang for buck.
 
Didn't have a issue with my MSI motherboard when I was on AMD, depending which board you go for they generally have a 'heavier' VRM cooler compared to competitors.
 
Mostly used MSI Motherboards for both AMD and Intel (same for graphics cards too) and they have always been rock solid, unsure if they have UK RMA address however but never needed to return anything (yet).
 
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Thanks all. Sounding very positive which is great to hear. Lol @BUDFORCE

It's good to hear some actual responses from people who have the kit and not just review sites.

Appreciate the help.
 
As with any company, you should take their products on a case by case basis. They've some excellent products, they also have the odd stinker, but they do release some genuinely fantastic motherboards.

The AM4 and AM5 Tomahawks are mostly brilliant as an example.
 
you have to look at individual reviews to avoid stinkers with any brand of course but MSI do make some good ones and i had quite a good experience with them.

my main pc has an msi meg unifi and i have a couple of other msi boards for messing about with older cheap builds
 
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using the b650m mortar wifi with my ryzen 7600. zero issues
detected my 6000c32 ram and runs xmp without any other tweaking

fyi if you haven't realised already that all the msi b650 boards are pcie gen 4 only (no pcie5 ssd if it's something you're specifically looking for)
 
Always had excellent experiences with MSI boards, got a X470 Gaming Pro Carbon in my Unraid server that has been on 24x7 for several years.

Currently have a X670E Carbon Wifi in my main PC - wasn't planning on buying X670E but found that with the B650/B650E there were some very strange decisions made about sharing PCI-E lanes for the M2 drives with the first PCI-E slot - start filling up the M2 slots and you lose bandwidth to the PCI-E slots. The X670E didn't have that issue, whereas the B650 Carbon Wifi did.
 
I had a MSI Z690A motherboard when they were first released, along with a 12700k. It was "ok". However there were issues with it that whilst MSI did acknowledge them there were no guarantees they could be fixed with a BIOS update within the two weeks window of an easy return.
So I returned the board for a Gigabyte variant, the first thing I noted was how light and somewhat "flimsy" the MSI board seemed compared to the Gigabyte. Perhaps "flimsy" is too strong, but I do remember holding and looking at them both together and just feeling more assured about the gigabyte board, perhaps in an irrelevant way.
The Gigabyte board, still using, worked out fine and it turned out MSI managed to resolve the issues with the AL CPU's with a later BIOS update.

Putting that issue aside, and if I did then I would not have compared it to a Gigabyte board, I would have been happy enough suggesting that the MSI one was relatively "cheap and cheerful".
 
I've had loads of MSI boards and never had any issues with any of them, they are one of the first to release bios updates, I had different MSI boards all the way through 1st, 2nd and most of the 3rd gen ryzens, and non of them let me down, I had a gigabyte board towards the end of 3rd gen and they seem to forget about them, slow with bios updates and when they finally do remember they are in beta forever, I think the last bios for the master x570S is still in beta.
If MSI had of made a fully loaded matx board for Ryzen 7000 I'd of brought one, but they didn't and the only one that did is ANUS, so I now have a gene, but to be honest, I love it, and although it did let me down (LAN port died) the replacement hasn't let me down.
 
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I avoided MSI boards for years after many issues both for myself and other people that brought their pc's for me to fix. This was mainly in the good old socket 775 days. My main go to manufacturer was Asus but quality declined while prices increased so I switched to Gigabyte for Z390. I hated the bios layout though so when I switched to Z690 I bit the bullet and went for a MSI board and am glad that I did as it's a beauty. I have had zero problems with it, it looks good, performs good and they are on the ball with bios revisions. My next board will probably be MSI as well.
 
I have a B550M Mortar Max Wifi 6e/BT5.2 MATX and a B450i Gaming Plus AC MITX and both have been faultless with countless updates, even the b450i which was 2nd hand and now old, has had recent and ongoing bios updates and runs perfectly and has a very good featureset...

My B550M even has a dedicated usb/button to update the bios with only power plugged into it, it was constantly on sale too so cost me something silly like £130 instead of £170-180 and then went down to £120 for a bit after buying it, has massive heat sinks on it, posh caps and a triple or quad layer posh pcb etc, I'd say they're well made, but I wouldn't touch their gpu's, they seem to always been cheapily made, lacking a metal baseplate, loud with coil wine, fail and not be any cheaper than better spec/brand cards, so I'm not biased against the company.
 
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