MSI Z370 TOMAHAWK LGA 1151 (300 Series) Intel Z370 HDMI USB 3.1 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: - Stable so far, holding my 8600K at 4.8Ghz w/ 1.129V vCore on load. Haven't played around enough with the overclocking features to really tell how far I can push my 8600, but with an H55 and this board it seems stable enough for the 3 days I've been running the overclock. Prime95 does push the temps on the cpu but I have a pretty old AIO, even though my case is pretty cable managed (not professionally like everyone else's, mind you. Just rudimentary stuff-it-in-the-back stuff, like a quick 'n dirty Vegas romp...heh).

- XMP worked as advertised and clocked my G.Skill TridentZ to its rated 3200Mhz. Have not tried overclocking the ram yet, but the board seems to have ample features.

- Capacitors seem solid and not cheaply slapped on. Connectors are smartly placed. M.2 is thankfully positioned above the GPU, not under it like the B350 version.

- Reinforced PCIe slot is a nice touch, and definitely feels secure for my 980. My old board (Z68MA-D2H-B3) allowed my gpu to sag like 80-year-old tattooed skin.

- Mounting holes lined up with my Lian Li case; one of the reasons I chose this board over Gigabyte was because the standoff holes looked off on the Gigabyte.

- Unobnoxious lighting; I don't prefer RGB lighting so seeing less of it is nice. However, it does come with some lights on the board and behind it, as well as a connector for another strip if that's your preference. I'd say RGB potential is limited.

- Looks pretty nice and "office-like" in person, despite the gaming label. This fit my needs perfectly and is more in line with "function over form", although impressing your friends at a LAN gathering isn't impossible with this board.

- Rebate put the board in the 109.99 price point. Was considering pulling the trigger when the board itself was 149.99, but really happy I was patient enough (rare occurrence) to see the 129.99 price.

Cons: - Bios seems a bit messy with unhelpful hints, if at all in some parts. I've never used a UEFI bios, however, so I am definitely not the best person to be commenting on this feature. It's just it conflicts a bit with my ocd. There is a new bios update as of 11/02 I believe, which fixes some throttling issues using Prime95 on the 8700K. Can't comment on the effectiveness of the update, as I don't have an 8700K.

- I did play around with the RGB lighting options in the Mystic Lighting app for fun, and they're pretty limited: there's only one color from what I could tell, and that's red. Blue comes up when you toggle the on-board lighting to the "CPU Temp" setting. I'm guessing the color changes from blue to red depending on the temp. Not sure if there's a middle color, but I doubt it.

- Rebate sucks to complete, but you knew that already.

Overall Review: - Upgraded my motherboard and cpu, and everything went as smooth as I could have wished for.

- Came with extra SATA cables and some RGB cabling (I'm assuming). A nice touch compared to the motherboards of yesteryear, to which I'm comparing this board to.

- Upgraded from a Z68MA-D2H-B3 by Gigabyte, my trusty i5 2500K, and 4 sticks of 4GB DDR3 @ 1333 to this board, an i5 8600K, and 2 sticks of 8GB 3200. Gotta say, well worth the investment. From light work on Photoshop to my after-work Arma III gaming, this board, paired with the 8600K and new ram has given me many more years of what is seeming to be stable performance. Being used to the 2500K, I was thinking I wouldn't need to upgrade for a while still, but having this set up has breathed new life into my desktop.

*** Side-note: I run Arma III in SP mostly, with weapons mods, AI improvement mods like VCOM and bCombat, as well as the all-important JSRS and Blastcore. With my 40-some mods, I used to get 10-26 FPS on high settings with draw distance turned down, and Steam subscribed missions and AI-heavy SP games as my usual modus operandi. Cities would be unplayable after vehicles would enter the picture, and even open country scenarios would lag heavily after all my badly mashed together mods would start loading their numerous scripts onto my CPU and RAM. YAAB ran at 22FPS max with all my mods, and 35FPS max with only AI mods and JSRS. With this new setup, I'm easily getting 39-45FPS on YAAB and 70+ with AI mods and JSRS. Just blown away by the performance difference.

Pros: Nice BIOS interface
Easy to create a RAID 0 with two 512GB M.2 cards

Cons: I had to re-seat my GPU (1080) a half a dozen times during the first week of use because the computer would crash during games, still not sure if it's something with the PCI-E slot or not. It has worked now for 3+ months since this issue, but I didn't have this issue with my previous mobo
Around month 3 of using the mobo my 2 HDD's would randomly stop getting detected by the mobo during a cold boot (no issues with my M.2 cards). Thought maybe they were dying so I got a new one, same thing still happened. Moving to the other SATA slots doesn't help. If I do a warm boot the HDDs come up fine. Already tried different SATA cables and power source, no luck.

Overall Review: Bought this mobo as a combo with an i7-8700k, but I'm having more issues with this mobo than I'd like. Unfortunately I didn't return the mobo during warranty when I first put the computer together.

Shopping for a replacement.