Final Words and Conclusion - The MSI Z370-A Pro Motherboard Review: Entry Level Business (And Pleasu
Conclusion
The MSI Z370-A Pro was designed to be a solid and reliable motherboard for business use. The board offers users the basics out of the platform such as a single M.2 slot, six SATA ports, Gigabit LAN, and even Crossfire support for dual-GPU AMD Radeon Gaming. Priced at ~$110, this places the board on the inexpensive side of Z370, but does include most anything business users may need, including the ability to overclock and should be applicable in single-GPU gaming.
Overall the MSI Z370-A Pro is a base line for Z370: it includes six SATA ports, a single M.2 slot for high-speed storage, Realtek audio, and a single Realtek NIC. The 6-phase power delivery, while seemingly small compared to more expensive boards, handled the i7-8700K without issue at stock and during our overclock testing hitting 5.1 GHz along with most other boards tested.
About the only gripes I have about the board is a lack of USB 3.1 ports on the board. If you need high-speed USB storage, that will have to come from a PCIe x1 riser card. Other than that, the brown PCB may not tickle many user's fancies, however, this is a board from the Pro line and aesthetics/being on display isn't its primary function so it is difficult to call that a fault. That said I would still like to have seen an RGB header on the board just in case.
The performance results showed nothing out of the ordinary with the datasets landing, on average, in the fat part of the bell curve with most boards. We saw a few results that were above the line, but overall performance was in line with the other patched boards where it should be.
Priced at $110, the motherboard has a fair amount of competition in that space with others such as the GIGABYTE Z370P D3 ($104), the ASRock Z370 Pro4 ($108), and the ASUS Intel Prime Z370-P ($120) lurking on shelves. The major differences between the boards come in the physical setup as well as components chosen. For example, the ASRock and ASUS boards have two M.2 slots to use with the latter offering four SATA ports instead of six. There are differences in the audio codecs used (such as Realtek ALC892 vs ALC887), as well as video outputs. So it depends on what is actually needed and apperance as to what board is best in this price bracket.
The MSI Z370-A Pro has shown to perform well in our testing and keep up with overclocking. While the feature set may not be as long as much more expensive boards, it should still provide users with the features needed and is a solid platform to build a PC, be it for business or just a less expensive board for a 'regular' user.
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