MSi Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4

Designed to fail....and it did! – Certified technical electrician for 28-years, IT pro for 22-years along with that, built countless computers, used MSI products for 23 years, and never have I seen, what I allege, a component that has intentionally been 'designed to fail' on motherboard; in fact, the design carries the same 'designed to fail' trait that I allege Apple introduced on their logic boards within the iPhone 5S.

'What is this person talking about? Apple? What have they got to do with this?', you might be saying to yourself. Please let me add some context so you can relate to my technical credibility and to explain the MSI failure I experienced:

You see, on the Apple iPhone 5S, there are four (4) screws that fix the 'LCD connector plate' to the logic board and one (1) screw is slightly longer than the other three; now if you are not careful when repairing the iPhone 5S, 5C, SE etc., then if you screw the longest screw into the wrong place the screw will cut through the logic board and damage a circuit track, which causes the screen to not turn on. I never did this, and in fact was one of the first people to discover this fault.

Unfortunately, all the M.2 connector sockets on this motherboard incorporate a mounting block and a screw thread tapping for the M.2 heat sinks fix down to and it is possible for the heatsink screw to screw down and cut through the circuit tracks for the NVMe drive connections so the mainboard damaged, causing the SSD to be undetected. Now you have a broken mainboard just like me!

As I stated at the start, I have a lot of experience and I did not overtighten the screw, besides, the fact remains that if I designed mainboards with all my experience and qualifications I would never even introduce a point of failure like this....unless I wanted it to fail ;) Additionally, the mounting block tolerances (thread depth) of this M.2 Connector for the mounting block, between the 'little' M.2 connector circuit board within, are clearly so fine that if there was a screw manufacturing intolerance of the heat sink screw, or depth the counter-sink hole within the heat sink are greater than 2/1000in - it doesn't really matter how long or deep by the looks of what happened in my case - then the M.2 connector will be damaged when fixing the heat sink to the mainboard.

Recommendation: Do not but this motherboard. If you have bought it be very careful when fixing the M.2 heat sinks. If have bought it and noticed a M.2 SSD drive is not detected, then take your motherboard back to where you bought it along with this review and I hope you get your money back.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your time.

Fantastic – Great quality for the price point, nothing too unnecessary but plenty of room for expansion. Enough for considerable overclocking. PCIe 5 for graphics card, 3 m.2 gen 4 slots, plenty of usb headers.

Perfect motherboard – Motherboard does everything i need it to. Solid connectors, good Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, supports all the latest technologies, 10/10 would recommend to anyone in the market for a good DDR5 board.

Modest features with a lower entry-level price – Built a new machine with the bleeding edge components from Intel and others, however I didn't need anything with a lot of frills and this suited my purpose very nicely. Love having 4 x M.2 SSD slots and complete I/O interfaces, however be warned that you will need a wire to connect to internet first time using it tho it has an Wi-Fi card built in. MSI should have updated its factory BIOS.