Fantastic feature set at a phenomenal price
MSI’s Z170A gaming series has impressed us. It’s a solid lineup, boasting a variety of feature-rich gaming motherboards at a fairly sensible range of prices. The M9 ACK sits at the top end of this spectrum, but can it possibly warrant such a high price tag? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out.
Let’s start with the M9’s biggest selling point, namely its audio. Undeniably stunning, the M9 ACK features multiple headphone amplifiers, a high quality audio processor, and insane audio capacitors, all rounded off with a nice chunk of highspec EMI shielding. The sound quality is beautiful. If you’ve ever thought your headphones are too quiet, this board will quickly jump to the rescue. On top of that, MSI has collaborated with Nahimic to provide an audio enhancing software suite, similar to THX’s now long-antiquated Crystallizer software, except a lot, lot better. Honestly, it isn’t easy to get across how impressive this audio solution is, so we’ll sum it up this way instead: Unless you have an external DAC, your audio is terrible in comparison. And honestly, that’s high praise for an integrated sound solution.
This isn’t the only area where the M9 shines. On top of all of this audio wizardry, MSI has an incredibly well thoughtout network subsystem. Partnering with Killer, Micro Star International has developed software that utilizes both 802.11ac and traditional Ethernet. What this does is successfully prioritize application bandwidth effectively between the two data streams, ensuring your games are transmitted via Ethernet, and your VoIP, web pages, and other less important applications are sent over wireless. Admittedly, this does feel like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. After all, who’s transmitting 1Gbps of data down an Ethernet cable at any given one time anyway?
Even Killer’s advertising for its shield tech states that it has a 0.2 millisecond edge over its competitor. But we’d be surprised if you ever noticed that. Like seriously no, you won’t, don’t even joke, it’s not a thing. To give you some clarity here, that’s essentially 1/5,000 of a second advantage over the non-Killer users for latency. Just seriously, stop.
Taking a leaf from the Asus Maximus Formula, the M9 also features integrated water-cooling connectors for the voltage regulators. They may look stupidly jazzy, but they feature G1/4 threads, which means you can use any fitting you like to cool your VRMs. The flexibility on this one is great — props to MSI for ensuring that the watercooling enthusiasts are taken care of.
The big downside is the price. At $400, it needs to deliver on all fronts, and there’s a small problem with performance—you don’t get as much overclocking potential as you would from the more-affordable Z170A Gaming M7. This should give you pause for thought as to whether the additional features are worth the drop in overall overclock stability. On top of that, you’re limited to two-way SLI or three-way CrossFire, in contrast to the vast majority of competitor boards at this price point that support three-way Nvidia graphics solutions and quad CrossFire setups.
This M9 doesn’t come without flaws, but the integrated audio solution is second to none. And although the Killer networking solution won’t see much advantage over gigabit Ethernet sockets, it’s a fantastic innovation in an area that’s otherwise not seen a great deal of advancement beyond 802.11ac in the last few years. If you’ve got the money, and really want the best audio you can get outside of an external DAC setup, and a stunning motherboard to boot, the MSI Z170 Gaming M9 ACK is the board for you. – ZAK STOREY
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel Z170
Socket LGA 1151
Form factor ATX
Memory support DDR4/3600
Storage 6x SATA, 2x M.2, 2x SATA Express
USB 5x USB 2.0, 6x USB3.0, 6x USB 3.1 Type-A, 2x USB 3.1 Type-C