MSI MEG Z590 Ace Motherboard Review: Premium Rocket Lake with TB4 and 4x M.2

MSI MEG Z590 Ace Conclusion

For many conventional PC users building a new system, selecting a motherboard primarily comes down to several reasons, with the most notable one coming down to budget. While the battle between AMD and Intel in both performance and value is raging on, it's a good time for users that are looking to capitalize on a new processor. The drawback is, over the years, motherboard prices have been rising exponentially, with the flagship models costing upwards of $1000. In the example of Rocket Lake, the Core i9-11900K can be bought from Amazon for $590, with a flagship motherboard model costing nearly double that. It comes down to features, capability, and controller sets, with more premium variants of all three of the elements leading to increased pricing. To get premium features, including those from Intel's Z590 chipset, users don't need to spend $1000 to get an enhanced experience, with the MSI MEG Z590 Ace offering lots of quality for a lower price than halo parts.

Above the mid-range offerings, but sitting below the flagships, is the MSI MEG Z590 Ace, with its all-black and now all-metal aesthetic, which is an improvement over the Z490 Ace and offers users a better all-round premium-feeling product. There's also enough RGB LED lighting for users to customize the aesthetic, with a solid selection of premium components on offer for users to get to grips with. Not targeted at a specific market, MSI caters to a wider market with the Ace, including gamers, enthusiasts, and content creators.

The Ace has four M.2 slots in terms of features, which is just one of a handful of models on Z590 to offer this, with one operating at the fastest PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds and the other three at PCIe 3.0 x4. Two of the PCIe 3.0 x4 slots support SATA, and unfortunately, the bottom PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot shares bandwidth with the chipset-driven full-length PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, which means populating the aforementioned slot will drop the PCIe slot bandwidth . In addition to this, there are six SATA ports which all feature support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. There are three full-length PCIe slots, including two PCIe 4.0 operating at x16 and x8/x8, while the bottom full-length slot is electronically locked to PCIe 3.0 x4. Located in between the full-length slots are two PCIe 3.0 x1 slots.

On the controller set, MSI includes Intel's latest Maple Ridge Thunderbolt 4 controller, which adds dual Type-C on the rear panel, as well as two mini-DisplayPort video inputs that allow users to daisy chain compatible displays. This is a better quality alternative to USB 3.2 G2x2 which the Ace omits, with 40 Gbps versus 20 Gbps for better data transfer speeds. Users looking for additional Type-C connectivity can add one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C port with one front panel header featured. Other USB connectivity includes two USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and two USB 2.0 on the rear panel, although two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports and four USB 2.0 ports can be added via the front panel headers. Networking capability is decent, with one Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE port on the rear panel, with the latest Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi also allows users to connect BT 5.2 devices up.

What's also interesting is what comes in the box with the board. First up is a USB drive with all the drivers and software - moving to USB for this has been very much requested, as cheaper boards come with DVDs, and almost no-one buying these boards has an optical disk drive any more. So the USB drive is very much appreciated. The other angle is that the box contains a cleaning brush. I guess for your keyboard?

Focusing on performance, the MSI MEG Z590 Ace performed competitively against other Z590 models tested. Although it was a little more power-hungry than most, it did well across our system, compute, and gaming benchmarks. Particular highlights include Cinebench R23, where we got the highest multi-threaded score so far on Z590, while in our system testing, DPC latency out of the box and POST times were respectable.

Overclocking with the Ace also proved fruitful. A particular highlight is having the ability to select what cooling method is being used in the BIOS, which determines the level of power the board and CPU will use when in operation. While this isn't a new feature, it's nice to see MSI implement it into the firmware. As we overclocked our Core i9-11900K, it was apparent that selecting water cooling/AIO also disabled thermal throttling, which saw us achieve even more performance in our POV-Ray testing. Regarding CPU VCore and VDroop control, it was relatively tight, but nothing completely off the rails, so the firmware and the large 18-phase power delivery are doing their job well.

In our VRM thermal testing, with good and consistent temperatures throughout, especially compared to the competition. It's nice to see MSI isn't just dumping heat into the power plane area around the CPU socket and effectively pulling heat away with a combination of large heatsinks and adequate passive airflow when installed into our test system.

Final Thoughts

At the time of writing, the MSI MEG Z590 Ace is available at Amazon for $470 and at Newegg for $492, so we recommend users make their purchase at Amazon. Regarding competition, the best comes from ASUS with the ROG Maximus XIII Hero ($500), with a very similar feature set, but includes two Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE controllers, and has six USB 3.2 G2 Type-A ports on the rear panel. Both boards are solid examples of premium models, so the decision comes down to aesthetics and rear panel connectivity.

Overall when judging the MSI MEG Z590 Ace on its own merits, it's a solid motherboard with plenty of premium features, including Thunderbolt 4, four M.2, PCIe 4.0, and performs well in our test suite. Given the quality of the competition at the $450-500 price point, it's hard to directly recommend the MSI other than it's got everything a premium model should have; it looks good and performs just as well. The fact MSI has improved and has opted for all-metal covers instead of garish plastic covers is something we feel worthy of applauding.