Amazon.com: Customer reviews: MSI MEG Z390 GODLIKE LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) M.2 USB 3.1 Gen 2 DDR4 Wi-Fi SLI CFX Extended ATX Z390 Gaming Motherboard

Sexy, Beautiful, and an Overclockers paradise...if you have the money!

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2019

I purchased the MSI MEG Z390 Godlike for a personal computer build. I built my system, using the Godlike as my base component. My CPU of choice was the i9-9900k. I included an MSI 2080 RTX Gaming Trio Video Card, and 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB Memory. The cooler I used was a Corsair 150i RGB AIO. I was not disappointed.

The motherboard is black and grey, with silver highlights. It is a large E-ATX board (make sure you have a roomy case). It is presented nicely in the box, without the normal static bag protecting it. This allows for a window to view the motherboard, unobstructed. It is a sight to behold.

The Godlike earns it’s name. It is a beast when overclocking. It has 18 phase VRM and the voltage is stable as a rock. There are two CPU power 8 -pin connectors, and a 6-pin PCIe Power Connector (for overclocking Video Cards). included in the BIOS is management for voltage droop, as well as a myriad of other overclocking related functions. I am currently running my system at a 5.1 GHz overclock, using the Gaming Boost function on the Godlike. The Gaming Boost overclock is controlled via a dial on the mother board, BIOS, or MSI's Dragon Center Software (from within windows). I choose the easy route by using the Dragon Center Software. I was not disappointed. My system is stable as a rock at 5.1 GHz, with manageable heat dispersion (35c idle, 62c Gaming). I am sure I could run a higher overclock using Gaming Boost, as the included auto settings on the Gaming Boost overclock software are outstanding.

The Godlike has multiple LEDs on board telling the owner of the state of the motherboard, and other components, without the need to be in the BIOS or windows. This is very handy for diagnosing errors and other issues. These LEDs are a "Godsend" for hardcore overclockers and allow on the board monitoring while using Liquid Nitrogen or other extreme methods of overclocking. In fact, the board has multiple fan headers, and even a "Pump" header. It even has a liquid flow indicator header. Very handy, indeed.

The three (3) on board M.2 slots allow for a plethora of storage options. Besides the M.2 slots on the board itself, is a PCIe Card with two more M.2 slots. There are six (6) SATA ports, and a U2 connector as well. Note: Using the various M.2 slots will affect the SATA ports and the U2 Connector that are available to use. Using a NVMe is recommended over a SATA M.2, as this configuration will leave the most SATA ports open for use (as well as being much faster for accessing and read/write).

The Godlike has 4 PCIe slots and a Mini slot. It will run Crossfire or NVIDIA SLI and comes with an SLI Bridge in the box. Make sure you use the best slots for your cards, as instructed in the Motherboard manual.

The Godlike has an on-board Infinity RGP Mirror, a "MEG" RGB Tagline, a MSI "Lucky" Dragon RGB, and an amazing OLED Screen with Error/Temperature two number LED above OLED. The screen, and other RGB elements, can be controlled via the Dragon Center Software. The OLED Screen is called the "Dashboard". It can be used to display voltages, temps, and other hardware information. The "Dashboard" screen has a rather cute set of built in function indicators when using said functions; Gaming Boost, Fan and Temperature info, Sleep/Wake/Power On, and Errors. The screen is rather handy when monitoring the motherboard and system. It is also just plain fun. I love watching "Lucky" the Dragon battling Ninjas as a method of letting me know my system is running smoothly. It is just too cool.

If you love RGB lighting, the Godlike will not disappoint. Included with the on board RGB lighting and OLED Dashboard, are headers for plugging in ASUS Aura or Corsair Rainbow lighting accessories. I currently have my "Rainbow" accessories plugged into the board... and it is beautiful to behold. I love that I can control my RGB system lighting from the Dragon Center Software. The software is currently being improved, as it does have some issues. The RGB lighting sometimes has a mind of its own and requires some manipulation for Dragon Center to get the lighting to work properly. The software can also forget setting and revert to a neutral state. My research into these issues has led to my understanding that MSI is working to fix these problems. The 80% of the time the RGB Dragon Center lighting works is a sight to behold. I am sure MSI will sort out the issues, as they are responsive to their customers, as evident by the interactions MSI has on their Forums.

An accessory included with the board, is a Capture Card. I plugged it into the 4th PCIe slot, and it runs like a charm. It does not require driver updates and uses XSplit or OBS to control it. It works wonderfully, and the HDMI Port in the backs accepts ANY outbound Signal for broadcasting. This includes other Computers, Video Cameras, Phones, and Game Consoles. A very nice addition.

I love this board. It is an amazing piece of tech... but it is expensive! This is a premium enthusiast board, and it is not for beginners. If you want the latest and greatest hardware, get this wonderful board. It is amazing, fun, and if you want a challenge (overclockers listen up) it affords one. I cannot recommend this board any more highly, if you have the time and money.

PROS:
Great Overclocker
Two 8-pin CPU Power Connectors, and a 6-pin Power Connector to feed additional power for overclocking video cards
Many Storage Options
Dashboard Screen with Error/Temperature LED above
Multiple Fan Heads, a Pump Header, and Liquid Flow Indicator Header
LEDs displaying system status
Cool RGB Effects (Dragon, Meg, and Infinity Mirror)
Can control many current RGB options (Corsair Rainbow and ASUS Aura)
Beautiful

CONS:
Expensive!
Not for Beginners
Some issues with the Dragon Center Software

Rating: 95/100

24 people found this helpful

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Carl A.

Definetly the best Motherboard !!!!

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2019

Verified Purchase

This is definitely a motherboard that is worth every penny. It may seem like an expensive price to pay but you are getting your moneys worth. It has a total of FIVE m.2 ports to install some super fast hard rives, which five is incredibly impressive and future proofing. Along with one u.2 port. It can handle up to 128 GB or DDR4 ram which is way more than I will ever need to have but amazing to say the least. Bluetooth and built in WiFi! I could go on and on about all the amazing specs that this motherboard has. It also has some really cool LED lights throughout the motherboard. Now onto the software amazing software with lots of settings that can easily be adjusted. while I personally don't overclock my PC it could easily be done via the software or the built in PC Overclocking knob on the motherboard itself and all of it can easily be reset back to its standard settings. And installation was a breeze. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS MOTHERBOARD TO ANYONE THAT WANTS THE BEST MOTHERBOARD TO ANYONE THAT WANTS THE BEST MOST POWERFUL MOTHERBOARD ON THE MARKET!!!!!!!!!!

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Raleigh Littles

Too many useful features to count; years ahead of the rest.

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

I've been a PC builder for about 5 years now and my builds during this time have normally been $100-200 motherboards. Those motherboards, while functional, lacked some features that I didn't even think I wanted until I bought this motherboard that had it:

1. Integrated I/O shield
2. Individual status LEDs for CPU, RAM slots, and GPU
3. Miniature OLED display
4. RGB lighting and control
5. Overclocking dial, along with power/reset buttons
6. CMOS clearer button on the back
7. Switches for changing BIOS profiles
8. M2 drive heat sinks
9. 6.5 mm headphone jack output

And those are just the motherboard generation-agnostic features -- granted there are some features like the built-in WiFi that are unique to the 9th generation in particular which are supremely useful.

I hope the features of this motherboard can trickle down to entry-level boards in a few years. The BIOS software on this is also pretty expansive in terms of capabilities, however, the UX could have used a bit more work, and its clear there are perhaps some translation issues as there's a few grammatical errors which are fairly minor, but are more of a visual inconvenience.

Also, as is natural for many high-end products, this motherboard came with a few nice add-ons:

1. A PCIe HDMI capture card. Haven't used this yet, and I'm unsure its specifications, but I will update this review once I've tested it.
2. A PCI-E M2 expansion slot. The motherboard already comes with 3 slots, but if thats not enough for you, then this device is handy.
3. External antenna for LAN/Bluetooth

I haven't had this board for very long so I couldn't genuinely comment on any features like longevity/durability, but it at least feels sturdy -- unlike other boards it's not going to make you sweat pulling out the 24-pin power connector, for example.

49 people found this helpful

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Godhere Sinous

The best of the best motherboard in the word but with a pretty bad after sales service.

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

Everything okey for now and working fine without any issues.

The msi streaming boost capture card is useless.
The few times that it is compatible with any application, It turns out that it is locked at 1080x540,
practically a nasty narrow image on any serious monitor, and without any option to correct it.
Apart from that everything else works marvelously well.
Update:
The best motherboard on the planet but with the worst customer service in the world, that's why my qualification, since the one I bought on Amazon came out defective and I didn't have any serious support from the manufacturer and neither from Amazon who didn't want to replace it.

2 people found this helpful

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Brian

Great Motherboard for Gaming

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2019

Verified Purchase

As my title says, this is a great motherboard for gaming with a lot of bells and whistles, like built in DAC, and IO shield which makes installation convenient. This kit comes with a 1080p 60fps capture card which is perfect for streames, though I can say I have not tested that feature yet. The slots for the M.2 drives are well engineered and are insulated to minimize any heat transfer from other devices. There is also an included PCIe rack to mount even more M.2 drives if three is not enough, or for if better cooling is needed. The only draw back I found was there is not a lot of room to where the processor goes for liquid cooling, especially for the very popular NZXT Kraken. The Kraken does fit, but one has to install it at a 90 degree angle so it does not interfere with the RAM slots. This is minor for most people, but it does make the NZXT logo vertical which those who are OCD how their setup looks may not like this. An extra centimeter or two of space would have been nice. But overall, this baby performs very well.

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Joshua K.

Fantastic product! Not needed if you only use you pc for gaming)

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2019

Verified Purchase

So I will start by saying when I built my first pc a couple years ago, I purchased the MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC motherboard, which is also an MSI motherboard, that was perfect for gaming. Well I have recently started using my pc for a lot more than gaming. IE (coding, online classes, streaming, and video editing) so i was thinking about upgrading my build, and i kept seeing this motherboard pop up on different websites. And it was priced between $580- and $700. And I was like i would love to own that motherboard, but it is gonna be about a month before i can buy it. Then while i was online looking a different motherboards I Saw an amazon link for this motherboard and decided to check out the specs. Two days after i looked at it amazon put it on sale and caved in a bought it. And I could not be happier with this motherboard! But this motherboard is not designed for the person who just uses their pc for gaming. It is jammed packed with value, because it is not just a motherboard. It is a Kit that includes the motherboard, along with a MSI m.2 Xpander-z PCI card, and a Streaming boost card as well. Not to mention the sata cords and other items. If you know what you are doing this motherboard is very user friendly and easy to install, with a very detailed User Guide as well as a fairly large colored print out that marks all the slots and pins with labels of what they are for! But if you do not have a lot of experience building PC's then it will definitely be a little overwhelming. It is also larger than most which will require you to have a bigger case for everything to fit. For those reasons i gave this motherboard 4 stars in the Easy to Install rating. Lastly if you are just gaming on your pc you do not need this motherboard. This motherboard is designed for someone who is doing a lot more on their pc. This is designed for the person who is using their pc for not only gaming, but streaming, coding, video and audio recording as well as video editing. If you do some of these things on top of gaming on your PC than you get a lot of value for your money. But if your just using your pc for gaming the MSI, MEG Z390 Ace is a much better option for a fraction of the price. But if you are the streamer, coder, gamer, and video editor i would definitely suggest this motherboard!

3 people found this helpful

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William F. Roberts

Godlike? Well certainly Heavenly

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2019

Verified Purchase

I don't usually write much for reviews besides giving the product the stars I think it deserves but I wanted to say this MB is awesome. I usually go with Asus MB had really great luck with them, thought they were well made, but I decided to try MSI. I had an old mostly built computer before that had a lot of MSI parts and it still runs to this day so I knew the quality was there.
I wanted a good MB for my I9 9900k and I got it with this motherboard. The MB was a very easy install and it has plenty of M.2 3 on board and a card that adds 2 more if you need it, the Oled is a nice touch while I am shooting stuff I get to watch ninja's fight :).
My system has been up and running for a couple of month's now and so far no problems and everything runs smooth. I would definitely buy MSI products in the future. I could go on about all the bells and whistles this MB has but that is what the specs are for, if you get this motherboard you get a great MB.

Helpful

Evan Eck

Looks great, but you will most likely have issues.

Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2019

Verified Purchase

A great looking motherboard with lots of RGB lighting. Works great for gaming and runs well. The mystic light software seems to be still in beta because it has quite a few issues. It randomly shuts off the lights on startup, some light effects get stuck, and sometimes random lighting effects happen during shutdown and startup. The OLED screen stopped working after about a week of use. I went through the RMA process to try and get a motherboard with a working OLED screen and MSI sent me the same motherboard back and the OLED screen still doesn't work. While the motherboard is easy to install, has many headers for fans and lights, has many M.2 slots, and looks very nice, I am not happy that the OLED screen failed and MSI didn't give me a working screen through the RMA process. It still runs great but I just wasted considerable time and money sending it back just to get my same motherboard. When you pay a premium price, you expect a premium product and I think MSI missed the mark here. I would not recommend this motherboard to someone interested in a RGB PC.

Helpful

Doug Nicholson

Just can't get it to work 100%

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2020

Verified Purchase

I heard that MSI software is buggy. I fully experienced that on my laptop. I had hoped I was just unlucky with my last device, but my next computer is really showing MSI's integrity.
Got all the parts and put this baby together. Immediately run into a problem where I can't install more than 1 chip of DRAM. Shipping costs to get it repaired was 10% of the value of this board. Two weeks later with my room in a complete mess as my new configuration was put on hold, I get the board back. DRAM works, but now the built in RGB doesn't work. Another session with the help center and navigating through their unorganized website, and I'm recommended to ship it again for another repair.
I can't keep blowing money for repairs that should never have happened. I'm still young and I have loans to pay off. At least the computer works functionally, but it pisses me off that I have to go the next ~decade with an imperfect state-of-the-art motherboard. It's literally the only thing I'm buying for myself as a gamer/animator/programmer/engineer.
(Btw, the pre-installed Dragon Center is a lot better than on the laptop, but sometimes it simply won't detect some hardware's RGB without restarting the computer. Also very important: This Dragon Center is actually "Dragon Center 2.0", but it never says it anywhere. When the help center tells you to try installing Dragon Center 2.0, don't be tempted to try downloading suspicious software off a google search.)
Here's a mess of miscellaneous comments:
Does the motherboard perform well? Sure. I give large credit to my high end CPU and GPU though. Antenna was an awesome perk. I get 5G at full strength when my laptop only had like ~half at 2.4G. There's a knob on the motherboard to control overclocking, but it's not so useful after it's behind a case. There's an option in the bios to let the computer adjust overclocking automatically. Be careful. It sets itself to the default (the knob) every time you return to bios (which I did excessively). **make sure the knob is physically set to 0 as a default, otherwise you may accidentally max overclock your CPU without knowing why it's overheating. Oh, and you CAN change the gif in the LCD, but you'll probably need some knowledge of digital images to make your own (like setting DPI) (My gifs always seem to lag a ton though).

This rating is low because of my difficult experience with MSI, and putting a stain over my >2k rig (after already experiencing its full beauty before the repair), and then daring me to ship it a second time.
If I got to start over and build a new rig right now, I wouldn't build a MSI rig. What would I get instead? Not sure what else is mainstream. But from experience, I have never experienced or even heard more bugs/annoyances (some crippling) that are due to MSI products. I'm sick of this.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

René Bonvanie

Just incredible

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2019

Verified Purchase

After a hiatus of many years, I decided to build a PC again. My always very extensive research included reading lots of Amazon reviews of this product and other MSI products, but also watching many online videos, including watching an episode of Linus Tech Tips in which he and his friend built the "fastest PC money can buy." In it, it featured this motherboard and it became quite clear that if I wanted to build a "beast," it had to start with this critical component. A few days later I had purchased all the components and started the build.

What became quite clear was how incredibly well-built and feature-rich this motherboard is. Every time I was wondering how to connect something, I found there was a connector for it. Every time I was looking to push the envelope on speed –with stability– I found there was an easy way to do it. And, every time I was stuck, I found the manual and the MSI support site very helpful.

The PC is now two months up and running and it's been stable. I maxed out the memory with 64Gb. I maxed out the graphics with 2 Titan RTXs. It has 6Tb of M.2. It runs an i9-9900k. So, yes, it's a crazy setup. But so worth it. And all that is possible because at the heart of it is this amazing motherboard.

If there were one or two things to improve it'd be:
1. The number of USB 2.0 headers. There are two adjacent USB 3.0 headers and that's very helpful. But having only 2 USB 2.0 headers forced me to buy an extension.
2. A Thunderbolt header.

All-in-all, this is an incredible motherboard that I can highly recommend.

39 people found this helpful

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