MSI Z170 GAMING M Motherboards Spotted

With Intel’s Skylake launch coming up in the near future, motherboard manufacturers are starting to leak out little snippets of information to drum up interest in their own product lines before the release so consumers are more inclined to pre-order what they see. The most recent MSI with pictures of the upcoming GAMING M series motherboards. This time, the ‘M’ does not mean the form factor is microATX, but to lend itself as part of the branding for MSI; ‘M’ for “Master”. The three motherboards spotted today are the Z170A GAMING M5, Z170A GAMING M7 and Z170A GAMING M9 ACK.

The new series of motherboards will be split into three tiers; Enthusiast for best FPS in games, Performance for those who don’t mind playing at 1080p on MMO games such as League of Legends and Arsenal for those who only game on the off-chance on games that aren’t the most graphically intensive.

The three motherboards feature new heatsink designs from previous GAMING ranges and these make more sense in the ‘progression’ of upgrades, with the M5 having minimal armour, M7 featuring adequate armour and M9 being all out ballistic with a rear armour-plate and a hybrid water cooling MOSFET design.

The new boards feature OC Genie, but in a more tuning friendly format. Previously it was a single button that chose the best ‘settings’ for the CPU installed. Now the new Game Boost ‘knob’ has multiple settings for you to choose for both Intel i5 and i7 CPU’s that are capable of overclocking; and yes, it goes up to 11.

This is something slightly different, TWIN M.2 ports on a single motherboard. Not only are they M.2 ports, they are MSI TURBO M.2 ports, with the ability to reach speeds of up to 64Gb/s by enabling RAID0 between two installed M.2 SSD’s.