In my head, I kind of have an ideal system. One that involves a couple 512 GB Samsung 950 PRO drives in RAID, a single NVidia GTX 1080 videocard, and a high-clocked 6700K with 64 GB of RAM. Oh, and it involves this board, the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM. It's a match like no other, and here I have the board and the CPU already.

I have told MSI in the past that the MPOWER and GAMING brands shouldn't mix, and here they answer with a board that makes me eat my own words. The MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM has just the right choice of features and design elements for an incredible system, and it's not all that expensive, either. There's LEDs, but not in such a way or so many that those of you who aren't so keen on LEDs are going to mind. Pairing a host of high-speed drive options in every which way is what Intel's Z170 platform seems to really be all about, and MSI has also added a lot of CPU and memory overclocking goodies for you to get the most out of your fancy new Skylake CPU. With such an aesthetic design, you cannot ignore what it might be paired with, obviously only the fastest retail VGAs will do - NVidia's GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, and only the black and silver variants, like the FE cards, need apply. Why you wouldn't make use of the nice M.2 RAID option, I have no idea...

There is no Wi-Fi. Regular SATA 6 Gb/s performance kind of sucks bad, but why would you use SATA devices (other than a couple 4 TB platter drives when it won't matter) with this board? If you want to use dual VGAs, the close proximity of the PCIe x16 slots is not your friend either, but then again, there's this wonderful thing called watercooling! All said and done, the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM is over-the-top goodness that can be had at a reasonable price. It's built to not only be fast, but to last, and that's the most important part. It's overdone, but in all the right ways. Got one? Let us know in the forums!