MSI Readies the Z270 Gaming Plus Motherboard

[btarunr]

MSI is giving finishing touches to its Z270 Gaming Plus motherboard. Positioned around the $120-140 mark, the Z270 Gaming Plus covers the essentials, but lacks support for NVIDIA SLI, with its second PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot being electrical x4, and wired to the Z270 PCH. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors; and conditions it for the CPU using a simple 7-phase VRM. The CPU socket is wired to four DDR4 DIMM slots, and a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot.

The MSI Z270 Gaming Plus features a red LED lighting element. Storage connectivity includes six SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and a 32 Gb/s M.2 slot. There are no 10 Gb/s USB 3.1 ports, you get eight 5 Gb/s USB 3.0 ports (four on the rear panel, four by headers). Display outputs include one each of DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI. Networking is care of a single gigabit Ethernet interface, driven by an Intel-made controller. The 8-channel HD audio solution features a 90 dBA SNR CODEC, ground-layer isolation, and electrolytic capacitors over the front output. The board will be available later this week.



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[Ubersonic]

The lack of decent PCI-E slots on modern boards is starting to become something of a concern. It's like manufacturers say "meh most people will only plug in a GPU or two, fit a couple of x16 slots then just take up space with x1 slots and/or M.2 areas"

 

[BadIronTree]

The lack of decent PCI-E slots on modern boards is starting to become something of a concern. It's like manufacturers say "meh most people will only plug in a GPU or two, fit a couple of x16 slots then just take up space with x1 slots and/or M.2 areas"

Since they dropped official support for more than 2 GPU Nvidia and AMD? There is no point in quad SLI ...
If you need it for a workstation you will pay big money for the correct CPU+MOBO combo

 

[Ubersonic]

Since they dropped official support for more than 2 GPU Nvidia and AMD? There is no point in quad SLI ...
If you need it for a workstation you will pay big money for the correct CPU+MOBO combo

I'm not saying boards should have ten x16 slots, but more than two usable slots would be nice. Hell this board has four x1 slots, you can't put an SSD or 10GBE card or any other useful card in that except a sound card, and who the hell is going to want four additional sound cards?

 

[bonehead123]

The lack of decent PCI-E slots on modern boards is starting to become something of a concern. It's like manufacturers say "meh most people will only plug in a GPU or two, fit a couple of x16 slots then just take up space with x1 slots and/or M.2 areas"

Agreed, and for the mobo mfgr's, its the greed that feeds this need

 

[ShurikN]

Am I the only one who dislikes this barren look most modern motherboards have?

 

[RejZoR]

The lack of decent PCI-E slots on modern boards is starting to become something of a concern. It's like manufacturers say "meh most people will only plug in a GPU or two, fit a couple of x16 slots then just take up space with x1 slots and/or M.2 areas"

What's more concerning is that X58 from like 6 years ago had dual x16 slots. Fast forward to current day and X99 if you're not using top spec CPU can only have 2x PCIe x8.

 

[intelzen]

The lack of decent PCI-E slots on modern boards is starting to become something of a concern. It's like manufacturers say "meh most people will only plug in a GPU or two, fit a couple of x16 slots then just take up space with x1 slots and/or M.2 areas"

you know that none of GPUs are being bottlenecked with gen 3.0 x8 at this point? and only GTX 1080 expierience 2-3% performance drop when using gen 3.0 x4 or gen 2.0 x8... look it up:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/24.html
with every new gen gpu techpowerup does these tests... and still there is plenty of people who thinks that you need gen3 x16 for your cards or else it will choke GTX 970 (aka gtx 1050ti performance level) or something.... and companies knows that there is myths about this subject - for example inltes response to this: "yea that is a real problem and we have a solution.... give for our HEDT platform +200$ additional" and "oh, you wanted multi gpu? - give us another +200$ for those essential 40 line cpus, my smart buddy".

 

[Hood]

you know that none of GPUs are being bottlenecked with gen 3.0 x8 at this point? and only GTX 1080 expierience 2-3% performance drop when using gen 3.0 x4 or gen 2.0 x8... look it up:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/24.html
with every new gen gpu techpowerup does these tests... and still there is plenty of people who thinks that you need gen3 x16 for your cards or else it will choke GTX 970 (aka gtx 1050ti performance level) or something.... and companies knows that there is myths about this subject - for example inltes response to this: "yea that is a real problem and we have a solution.... give for our HEDT platform +200$ additional" and "oh, you wanted multi gpu? - give us another +200$ for those essential 40 line cpus, my smart buddy".

Very true, but I wasn't 100% sure about it until I got an Intel 750 400 GB for my boot drive, dropping my GPU to 8 lanes, with zero loss of performance. For me, this MSI board wouldn't work well, because the 2nd x16 slot is wired to the PCH, not the CPU, so my fast NVMe boot drive would run 5-10% slower ( I'm not sure about that, but I've read it somewhere). I don't have a PCIe 3.0 x 4 slot to test this theory, though, as my 3rd slot is PCIe 2.0 x 4 (wired to the PCH), which definitely cripples the speed of my Intel 750 (I tried it).

 

[MnkyBrs]

Red LEDs! Hot damn! What a unique selling feature.

 

[Grings]

I agree on the pci-e slots, ALL z270 boards should have a 4x slot at the bottom, the pch has 24 3.0 lanes ffs, i mean theres only 1 m2 slot

Lazy re-use of a design for h110-b250 boards imo