In our guide of recommended Z270 motherboards, we selected MSI's Z270 Gaming Carbon Pro as the top midrange choice. We made that pick when it was selling on the street for around $165 and up, though a glance around the web shows that's selling for a discount. Amazon, for example, has it listed for $140. And if you're willing to play the mail-in-rebate game, you can snag it for $130 at Newegg.
MSI's Z270 Gaming Carbon Pro is a slick looking motherboard with RGB lighting and, more importantly, lots of amenities. Among them are two M.2 slots, two reinforced PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots plus one that isn't reinforced, three PCI-E 3.0 x1 slots, six SATA 6Gbps ports, USB 3.1 connectivity (Type-C and Type-A), and several other odds and ends.
This board is also great for overclocking. In testing a Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K processor for our motherboard guide, the MSI Z270 Gaming Carbon Pro was the least expensive one to push the processor to 5GHz. It also managed 3,466MHz on the DRAM test, booting without issues whether using two modules or populating all four DIMM slots.
It doesn't have built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity, but other than that, it's hard to complain about this motherboard.
If you don't want to mess with a mail-in-rebate, head to Amazon and pick this up. Otherwise you can snag it from Newegg for $10 cheaper after rebate.
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