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MicroStar International is preparing to release one of the industry’s first premium mainboards for Intel Corp.’s “Skylake” microprocessors in mini-ITX form-factor. The new motherboard will support all features essential for modern high-performance personal computers and will even have overclocking capabilities.
The MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC platform is based on the Intel Z170 core-logic set and is designed for Intel’s latest central processing units powered by the “Skylake” micro-architecture in LGA1151 form-factor. The mainboard comes with five-phase voltage regulator module for CPU as well as 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors, reports TechPowerUp.
The new Z170I Gaming Pro AC motherboard features two DDR4 memory slots, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot for graphics cards, one high-performance M.2 connector (with PCI Express 3.0 x4 interface) for solid-state drives on the reverse side of the PCB, one SATA Express connector, four Serial ATA-6Gb/s ports, 8-channel audio, six USB 3.0 ports and so on.
The mainboard has rich networking connectivity options, including a Gigabit Ethernet controller as well as a mini PCI Express card with Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 support.
The MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC motherboard belongs to MSI Gaming lineup of products and thus supports basic overclocking capabilities, including DDR4 Boost technology and CPU tuning features.
The new mini-ITX mainboard from MSI will be among the first small form-factor platforms for Intel “Skylake” processors. The motherboard will hit the market in the coming weeks. Pricing of the MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC is unknown, but it is unlikely that it will be too expensive.
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KitGuru Says: Just imagine, a mini-ITX system featuring a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700K processor, an AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics card, a Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 solid-state drive, 32GB of high-performance DDR4 memory at 3200MHz as well as a 6TB high-performance WD Black hard disk drive. Sounds like a dream PC, isn’t it? This is what the MSI Z170I Gaming Pro AC motherboard allows one to build.
A correction to KitGuru Says: the bottom-side m.2 port accepts only up to 60mm long modules, so the 80mm Samsung SM951 will not fit. As 2280 increasingly seems to be the de facto size standard for m.2, and as m.2 seems to be fairly settled as the new OS-media standard, this may well be a misfire by MSI – especially when the boards by Gigabyte and ASRock competing in this space do offer 80mm m.2. Meanwhile, the Asus Z170 Maximus VIII Impact should appear any day now, and should give pause to anyone who was thinking of the MSI board for either its appearance or audio qualities.
what a balls up on the m2 socket which i noticed was on the short side in an advertising picture
well, the impact came out. zero m.2 slots on it. and it’s stupidly over priced. same goes for the evga z170 mitx board
Yeah, the Impact turned out to be a strange beast for an mitx board.
The use of *multiple* daughter boards would seem to complicate cabling and airflow management in tight quarters. That said, with no room to build out, the use of vertical space to incorporate advanced features onto a small footprint makes some sense.
The u.2 on the other hand is a bit of a head scratcher. I wonder if they simply couldn’t engineer an m.2 into the design in view of everything else crammed on there, and so had to settle on u.2 so they were at least offering *a* high speed storage interface.
For my money, the ASRock Fatality takes this segment – the worst I have to say about it is the branding!