MSI Z170A SLI Plus Overview
MSI has gone with an all black design with the Z170A SLI Plus. Not just a normal black, but a matte black with even the heatsinks being matte black. You can definitely say that the motherboard is blacked out! The motherboard is the typical ATX form factor (12in x 9.6in / 30.5×24.4cm) so you shouldn’t have a problem getting it into most cases.
Starting up by the CPU socket we can see that power delivery components, some of which are covered by the two matte black heatsinks. MSI makes use of their Military Class 4 components which include Dark Chokes and Dark Caps. The Dark Choke uses a special core design and allows it to run at a lower temperature with higher capacity and better power efficiency and stability. Dark Caps have an aluminum core design and provide lower Equivalent Series Resistance (ESR). At the top left of the board you will find your 8-pin EPS connector and closer to the DDR4 slots is your 4-pin CPU fan connector.
Moving over to the side of the board you have four DDR4 DIMM slots. These memory slots support dual-channel DDR4 memory up to 3600 MHz. At the edge of the board you have two 4-pin fan headers, your 24-pin ATX power connection and a USB 3.0 header. There is also three Z debug LEDs, one for the CPU, one for the DRAM and one for the VGA. So if there is a fault anywhere those LEDs will light up to let you know where it is.
As we move down the board the storage connections are placed a bit weird. There are two sets of two SATA 6GB/s ports at a 90 degree angle and two more than face up. Typically we see all of the SATA ports on the board at a 90 degree angle. There is also a second USB 3.0 header at a 90 degree angle here.
At the bottom of the board is where you will find the rest of your headers. From right to left you have your front panel headers, two USB 2.0 headers, Thunderbolt header, TPM header, serial port header, COM port header, another 4-pin fan header, and your front panel HD audio header.
As far as expansion slots go there are three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots and three PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slots. The first two PCI-Express x16 slots have metal shielding on them that give better stability and protect the slot itself. These top two slots are also spaced perfectly for triple-slot graphics cards. With a single card installed in the top slot it will run at x16 speed, with two cards installed (slot 1 & 2) they will run at x8 speed and finally with all three slots populated the cards will run at x8, x8, and x4.
Above the top PCI-Express slot is a M.2 slot. This is a Gen 3 x4 slot so you are going to get 32Gb/s of bandwidth. There is also another 4-pin fan header here, which is perfect for an exhaust fan. That gives you a total of 4 4-pin fan headers not including the CPU fan header.
At the far end of the board is where you will find your audio solution. This is MSI’s Audio Boost solution, which is based on the Realtek ALC1150 Codec with 7.1 channel sound. It features Chemi-Con Audio Capacitors, a completely isolated PCB layer and the left and right channels are on different PCB layers. While the audio solution is on its own PCB layer the clear separation does not light up like we’ve seen on other motherboards.
Finally moving on to the rear I/O we have PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, VGA, DVI, USB 3.1 Type-C, two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, and 7.1 channel audio.
