MSI Pro Series Intel X299 LGA 2066 DDR4 USB 3.1 SLI ATX Motherboard (X299 SLI PLUS)

It had been a long time since I used MSI, but have to tell you, I really love this board. It's configuration and layout is excellent for an MATX board. It booted right out of the box with no issues on a 7820X with 32GB of Corsair LPX ram at 3000 XMP. I did install the latest BIOS. It is an extremely fast board that looks and feels of high quality. I am running in a fairly small Silverstone PS07 case with no heat issues. I am running at stock speeds with an AIO cooler and getting around 28 C degrees at idle once it warms up. After being a fanboy for a particular brand (Not MSI), I was pleasantly surprised at this board and it's capabilities. A couple of things to mention - if you are not running multiple video cards, there is no reason to power the PCIE connector on the board. I love how the USB 3.0 connector is horizontal - it just works better in smaller spaces. The only con I can think of is that with the board speaker installed, it does not beep when it posts. That is OK if you can see the post codes, but in my case, the PC case prevents me from seeing those. If there is an issue with posting, it certainly beeps with codes, but a normal post does not verify that it is posting ok per the beep codes. To me, this board is way more substantial than the other choice in the market right now. I would recommend this board for an X299 build in a MATX case.

Amazing Mb. Paired with i7-7820X. Initially ordered a different board from another high end manufacturer that came with tons of memory issues & ultimately died within a few days. Sent back (which caused a bunch of issues during tear down) and spent more for the MSI. Flawless installation and after a few weeks is working as good as the day I bought it. Would buy again. First time using MSI products, very happy with the quality of the board from the second I opened the box and inspected.

I bought a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (RR-212E-20PK-R2) as my cooling solution for my Intel Core i7-7740X Processor. The aforementioned heat sink and fan are advertised to work for this socket (LGA 2066), but the mounting screws are too short. I just got off the phone with MSI’s tech “support.” The first of two options they gave me was to remove the backing plate that came attached to the motherboard, so that the screws would reach the supplied aftermarket backing plate. I’m a little bit wary of doing that because the original backing plate appears to be holding the socket housing to the motherboard. I could be wrong. The second option was to go to pcpartpicker.com, and search for cooling solutions that pcpartpicker.com deems compatible with this motherboard. I chose the second option and it said the cooling solution that I originally chose is compatible. So, either I do need to pull the original back plate off, or I can’t trust multiple sources as to what cooling solutions are compatible with this motherboard. Tech “support” told me that this motherboard socket was a LGA 2011-3. It isn’t a LGA 2011-3. It’s a LGA 2066. There are attached photos to illustrate some if not all of this. If allowed I will raise my review rating once this issue is resolved.Edit: I found that the screws supplied do NOT have to pass through the motherboard the thread into the front housing. That was not included in the instructions.There is, however, a new issue I’m having with this motherboard. There’s a USB port on the motherboard that stopped working with my ‘Logitech G9’ mouse back in September 2018. I plugged a cheap Microsoft mouse into the port and it “worked”.The Microsoft mouse had its own issues that I won’t get into here. I recently bought a ‘Logitech G502 Hero’ thinking that the Logitech G9, was dead. When the Logitech G502 Hero, wasn’t working I plugged it into the USB port on the front panel of my PC. It’s working fine in that port. Now I have my Logitech G9, plugged into the front port and it’s working fine. I guess other than diagnostic purposes this new mouse was a waste of money. Hopefully I can return it to amazon for a full refund.Moral of the story: Steer clear of MSI motherboards.MSI Pro Series Intel X299 LGA 2066 DDR4 USB 3.1 SLI ATX Motherboard (X299 SLI PLUS)

I loved this motherboard. I say this in past tense as sadly it was destroyed by a watercooler leak and I was unable to get the same board because it was just so hard to come by. Honestly, I would have if I came across it for a reasonable price again. It always performed well and looked sick.

This is a great motherboard. BUT, be careful. You have to get the right RAM, especially if you want to go up on capacity. If you only want to run 16 gigs of Ram, no problem, as long as it is DDR 4.. no problem. If you want to run 128 gigs, the chipset and motherboard get really picky. It will start to tweak until you lower it down, unless you fun only approved RAM by Intel. And good luck finding the list of approved Ram, not easy to do. Also, make sure you use the same, model, make, speed, manufacturer of Ram, or it will tweak also. But again, love the motherboard.

Use this for my editing/workstation and some gaming. The bios UI is great and easy to understand. I used to use Asus mobos but after having to deal with their very weak customer service I decided to jump ship to a different manufacturer. MSI has been awesome, easy to overclock easy to setup, easy to read manual. The one thing that bothers me about MSI is that I asked them some technical questions about thunderbolt and they kept having a sales rep contact me rather than just answering my technical but very simple question...

This board has worked well so far. However, the decision by MSI to continue the reverse order of an Sli configuration is quite annoying. I use two Nvidia gpus, and graphics card one (in the PCIe slot nearest the CPU) is shown to be in the number two slot, and the second gpu is shown to be in the number one slot. This of course is not the end of the world, but MSI tech support informed me that there is NO plans to remedy this issue. They also informed me that this has been a peculiarity of their "Pro series" boards (including their X99 platform Pro series boards). In conclusion, there are a number of things I want in a motherboard, and among them is precision engineering, and unfortunately that is not the case with this particular issue being unresolved.