MSI PRO Series Intel 8th Gen LGA 1151 M.2 DVI HDMI USB 3.1 Gigabit LAN CFX SLI ATX Motherboard (Z370 SLI PLUS)

For a used item, this motherboard looks like NEW. The computer posted on the first try.

Bought it in 2018. It's still working fine.

First a caveat or three: I tried in vain to install MacOS Mojave on this board for ever and it did not work. MSI boards use a specific memory controller which sometimes and sometimes does not work. Catalina does not have this problem. It was very simple.Caveat II; clearing up a misconception: When using a Z370 board with an9th generation Intel CPU you would have to flash the bios to use the board- for which you would need an 8th gen cpu. Not always true. You can check the serial number and the date of manufacture will clue you into the bios version. MSI’s website has a chart which shows which cpu requires which bios version. Mine was manufactured 10/2018 and had a late enough bios for my i5-9400f.Caveat III the last crusade: I could not initially work using the newest version of the bios (2A0) but worked flawlessly on the prior version (290).OK so with that out of the way, the board worked fantastically in MacOS and has a nice white light on it. Plenty of headers for fans, usb, yadda yadda.CPU install took around 45 seconds. Installing the board into the case took about 3 minutes and card installs took 2 minutes. Plenty of SATA connectors.I would expect that it works in Windows too, since it has all the fancy settings.

When it was time to replace my old P67 Gigabyte build with a new 8th gen coffee lake build, I chose the MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard. Having used Asus and Gigabyte boards in the past, I decided to give MSI a try this time based on motherboard specs, features and reviews. I spent a considerable amount of time comparing similar motherboard offerings and this one came out as the clear winner and having completed the build, all the time spent researching parts certainly paid off.I particularly like the UEFI BIOS and how easy it is to configure things like memory XMP profiles, overclocking, Windows 10 WHQL mode, fast boot, and much more. The board layout was a pleasure to work with and everything seems well thought out. I did a quick bit of overclocking on the Core i7 8700K and easily hit 5.0 GHz. I have yet to really dig in with all the OC settings, but I'm sure this board can handle it without breaking a sweat.Finally, the MysticLight RGB lights and software are pretty good and adds a nice, customizable touch of color to the case interior. The software can be a bit temperamental, but it has quite a few options to suit whatever color scheme you're going with in your build.Overall, I couldn't be happier with my choice and I'll be definitely using MSI motherboards and peripherals over Asus and Gigabyte in the future.Happy building!

I have used MSI motherboards almost exclusively for many years of building PCs for myself, friends, and family. They make rock solid products that last for many, many years of typical use. My first one, supporting a pentium D processor from over 12 years ago still works (not in use, but it still boots). Anyway, this board packs a ton of modern features in at a very reasonable price point. RGB and aRGB ports, USB 3 headers (note: no USB 3.1 gen 2 front panel connector for a type-c port), high quality audio capacitors and dedicated headphone amp, multiple high power usb 3.1 ports, includes intel brand wireless AC and bluetooth card. Everything you could want/ask for, it has it. This is in my new personal build, made Nov 2018.So why 4 stars and not 5? MSI Mystic Light software is absolute garbage. Granted, I will preface this by saying that none of the aRGB control software out there right now are 'great', they all have their own issues, bugs, problems, and lack of customization options. iCUE currently leads the pack, by far, but it still has plenty of issues and crashes on me frequently. I still firmly believe that anyone tech savvy is still currently much better off using an arduino and a free library to control their aRGB lights than any of the company's out there making 'plug-and-play' solutions.So, mystic light software:-Interface is not intuitive at all, nothing is labeled correctly, there are no hover-over help texts, and there is no real user manual for how it is supposed to work, so you are just kind of clicking on stuff, looking at your computer, clicking on stuff, seeing what changed, etc. to try and figure out what's going on.-The software is so slow that you routinely find yourself wondering if it crashed or not. You can click on something and it can take between 2 and 8 seconds to respond, if it responds at all.-It crashes regularly, from normal use, from trying to click things to quickly, from trying what I'm guessing are unintended combinations of settings...-Motherboard lights, including some above the RAM, quite a few on the back side of the board along the right side, and the logo over the chipset and i/o, is one 'section' that you can select in the software. Under that, you are presented with a list of lights that includes 'all', 'RAM<1-4>', and then 'LED<1-36>' or so. There is no distinction as to what LED is where, so it is blind trial and error. So you pick what you want to control, then what? That's a great question, because there really isn't any kind of explanation as to how to customize it. There is a bar of 5 lights that goes back and forth on the other side of the interface that is apparently how you are supposed to customize it. Why are there 5 lights? No idea. What do each of them do? No idea, it seems like it just updates the LED(s) to be whatever color of the 5 that you most recently changed. It doesn't cycle between them, there isn't any kind of pattern...-The GPU, also MSI, has an RGB logo on it, that you can't control through the software. You click on GPU on the main page of the interface and...nothing happens. There is no apparent way to change the color of that LED, and there is no way to individually turn it on or off.-So, ultimately, you can leave it as the default rainbow, at a fixed pace and pattern that cannot apparently be changed, or you can set each LED to a single, static color, or you can turn everything off completely. That's it. And to turn the GPU or the RAM lights off, you have to turn everything off.As someone who designs GUIs for a living, this software is just an unmitigated disaster, and MSI should be ashamed of themselves for promoting such a garbage product so heavily. So my computer has nice aRGB fans hooked up to a corsair lighting node run by iCUE, and the rest of the RGBs in my computer (GPU, Mobo, RAM) are all just off, because it's not worth the headache of trying to figure out how to make it work.