MSI Extreme Gaming Intel X99 LGA 2011 DDR4 USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard (X99A Gaming 7)

I absolutely love this MOBO. Previously I had the MSI X99S SLI Plus, but it only utilized 28 of the 40 Possible channels. It has a LED display to help with trouble shooting and shows the temp of the board. It can hold up to 8 DIMMs which are QUAD Channel and the MAX DDR4 RAM of 128GB. I currently have 32GB or DDR4 RAM. I built this device to be a Workhourse to run Many VMs including things like IBM QRadar which is a very Memory intensive and very taxing on the entire computer. I currently have a Nvidea GTX-960 Graphics card but it can easily handle up to 4 GPUs! I also have a PNY SSD Drive 240GB and a 1TB HDD, 2TB HDD. The OC Genie for OCing is a great Benefit.TURBO M.2 Gen3 x4 which suports 32 Gb/s, over 3 times the bandwidth than normal M.2 Solutions!!, 2xUSB3.1!!, 10XUSB3.0 and 6xUSBv1.0 Connections. Supports up to QUAD SLI and QUAD Crossfire with Optimal Slot Placement for GPU!!,CREATIVE SOUND BLASTER CINEMA 2: Thanks to Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 2, you're getting amazing surround sound with just stereo headphones or speakers. Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 2 enables you to clearly hear specific sounds in gaming environments. Hear your enemies perfectly, make your ears a decisive tool to finish on top.To shield the audio core from EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) caused by other add-in cards the audio chip is protected by a high-grade EMI cover with back light illumination.I am running an Intel i7-5820K Processor that has 12 Cores. It is also a Great Gaming Board but I use it more for work type things like running tons of VMs, SIEMs, and even VM Routers/Switches/FWs and IPSs!I got the MOBO as a Gift and have been running it since June 2016. I would but it again if something happened to it, I like it that much.

The first MSI MB I purchased was dead on arrival. Of course, when one first builds a computer, it's impossible to know whether it is the power supply, cpu, memory etc that is causing the failure to post. I had to take the entire system to a computer store to confirm my suspicion that it was the MB causing the problem.Thankfully, Amazon allowed me to replace the MB. The replacement motherboard is currently working flawlessly. The cpu, memory, and graphics card all fit easily into the mb. I am using the Intel 5820k cpu. I would have given 5 stars, but the first dead motherboard really caused a lot of problems for me.The manual is a little complicated, but thankfully MSI has good youtube videos for some of the more complicated power connections. I think MSI should help their customers with an expanded list of videos to help with putting the components together.Now that everything is working, I have the fastest computer I've ever owned.

I'm sure this motherboard is lovely when working. But had two defective models, took my rebuild to get 2 outside opinions from a repair shop and a guy I know from work who works on computers and both said the motherboard is causing my build not to function. Sent them back and ended up with another model. But thankfully these are easy to return on Amazon, thank god!

As a computer builder I've used MSI boards almost exclusively for two decades. There have been a few models that were duds (primarily with AMD CPU's) but overall MSI motherboards have been rock solid, especially the Intel models. I still use two systems every day with older MSI boards that I built 7 years ago. They're never turned off. This board is no exception. I bought two of them. They installed flawlessly and have been running almost a year without being shut off with no problems. The BIOS update was easy using a USB thumb drive. I installed Windows 10 with a Intel Core i7-6850K 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor. You can simply press the overclock Genie button on the board and it runs at 3.9GHz without knowing how to overclock. I also installed 32GB of Corsair Vengence LPS DDR4 RAM running at 2666 MHz. What really makes this board lightning fast is the NVMe drive. I installed a Samsung 960 PRO Series 512GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6P512BW and OMG! My first NVMe drive, I'm never going back. I noticed if you set the fan speeds with the Command Center software you have to reset them every time you reboot so set the fan speeds in the BIOS and they will stick. I highly recommend this board.

This was a good motherboard, but by it's second birthday it started acting up, restarts and internet switch off and on, by the point that it was just unusable. I believe this motherboard is defective from factory. I do not recommend. Customer service is good but the warranty is just two years (coincidence?) only MSI knows.

The board and software seem alright, but keep having problems with the killer Ethernet card built into the board. I have uploaded all the newest software but sometimes it just erases all my settings and the internet slows majorly. I finally just deactivated the additional software that came with the killer Ethernet and seems to do the trick. other than that the board seems alright, but I think I will go with another brand next time.

I literally ripped one of the PCI-e ports off the board trying to remove my secondary video card. Partly my fault, partly MSI's fault for not making it more durable. But the board is great.