MSI B560M PRO-E LGA 1200 Intel B560 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: - Easiest build + overclock I've had in 15 years. It took me roughly 15 minutes to replace my old MSI Z87 board with this B560 board. Everything worked and booted first try, with XMP enabled and power limiter raised. No UEFI update needed for my i5-11400 and I was even able to reuse my old 120MM tower cooler.

- Built with enough power for good overclocking (read overall review for more detail).

- UEFI layout hasn't changed much from my old Z87 board. This means if youve used an MSI board in the past 7 years or so, you should be able to find most of the settings you need pretty easily.

- Has the right headers if you want to add RGB stuff, but nothing built-in to run up the cost if you aren't into shiny lights. Perfect for a bedroom PC that will run 24/7.

- Good fan control built into the UEFI that can be configured for PWM or DC control for individual fans. Useful as one of my fans has a high pitch noise on PWM but is completely silent on DC.

- Good overclocking features. Includes a bunch of presets if you arent experienced, and a bunch of advanced features if you are. If you know absolutely nothing about overclocking and have a decent ($25+) cooler, you can get a good boost simply by going into the UEFIs OC menu, enabling XMP, and setting the power profile to Tower Cooler 135W. This works even on non-K chips so not much reason to NOT enable it unless you are using the pathetic stock Intel cooler.

- Built in 2.5G Ethernet and WiFi 6 gives this motherboard a solid bit of future-proofing.

- Solid built-in analogue audio. The headphone amp in particular is quite powerful. My 80 ohm professional headphones never need more than 24% from this board to rattle my brain.

Cons: *These are at best, nit-picks. I cant fault this board in any serious way.*

- The front panel connector pinout isnt printed very clearly on the board. Its there, but its kind of small and a little too far from the pins. My old MSI board had the pinout printed directly under the pins and in a slightly clearer font. It even had a quick connector block that let you pre-assemble the wires then click them to the board in one piece. Not a huge deal, but if your eyes arent the best you may need to grab a magnifying glass or download the manual for a clearer picture.

- The included WiFi antennas can interfere with nearby ports. You can just aim the antennas away, but Id have preferred a magnetic desktop antenna on an extension cable instead.

- No optical or coax digital audio output. If you want digital audio you will need to grab it from an HDMI output or get a USB adapter.

- Not sure if its my keyboard or the motherboard but about 10% of the time my keyboard would not be recognized on boot and Id have to unplug it and plug it in again. This happened on my old board's USB3.0 ports but it happened on every USB port with this motherboard. I switched over to PS/2 and havent had this issue since so if you run into this problem try adapting to PS/2.

- The back of the board was a little sticky in places from excess solder flux. Not enough to damage anything and nobody would notice this once the build is done but MSI could do a better job rinsing the board before shipping. This was nothing a little rubbing alcohol and a q-tip couldnt fix (My OCD got the better of me).

Overall Review: I was torn between this board and the overall very similar B560m BAZOOKA. The BAZOOKA looks a bit different and trades built-in WiFi and VGA output for a bigger VRM heatsink (and slightly higher price). I dont really need WiFi but if its free, why not? Still, Intels 11th gen chips suck down power like no other, so I was worried the smaller heatsink would be limiting. Thankfully, I can confirm that the heatsink on this board is perfectly fine for moderate overclocks. After maxing out the power limiters, I was able to lock my 11400 to its max turbo and after an hour of heavy AVX2 load (Average 155W/peaks to 165W, optimized FFMPEG vpx encode) the VRM on the motherboard peaked at a mere 62C, plenty of headroom for a good overclock on any 10th or 11th gen chip.

If you have a giant triple 140MM liquid cooler and want to try for 5ghz on all 8 of the 11900ks cores you will need a better board. Extreme overclockers should be looking at z590 boards, anyway. And possibly a nuclear reactor to power it. :D

- Bottom line -
Id certainly recommend this motherboard. The build quality seems every bit as good as my old MSI board (that ran overclocked for 7 years/1000s of hours and still works). The board is simple to get working with no driver/UEFI shenanigans. It has enough solid features built-in that most people will never need to use the two extra PCI-E 1x slots.

Pros: At least it fit in my ITX case??

Cons: DOA

Overall Review: MOBO is DOA.

CPU pins came bent, on a new board so it would throw CPU & DRAM errors.

Judging by some reviews, either I got their board, or other boards are coming with damage.