MSI Z97 PC Mate LGA1150 motherboard $69.99 AR AC Newegg

[Replay]

Newegg has the MSI Z97 PC Mate $69.99 shipped free, after the $10 rebate and a $15 coupon code: SUPERSALE779
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130779

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2389677
This Microcenter MSI Z97 PC Mate + Pentium G5238 $89.99 AR combo deal is still alive, but still pick-up only. I grabbed one & thought it was nice that the Pentium G5238 retail box had a copper core heatsink.

This MSI board is the cheapest Z97 on Newegg to begin with. MSI did not put a heatsink on some of the VRM's (look near the cpu power socket). Every other board at $100 or more has a heatsink there. Read somewhere that it has 6 phase power, but would have liked to have seen both VRM heatsinks installed on the board (the mounting holes are there).

MSI product page: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z97_PC_Mate.html#hero-overview. BIOS was updated to V4.3 on June 30th 2014, mostly for better Haswell support.

 

[Samus]

MSI product page: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z97_PC_Mate.html#hero-overview. BIOS was updated to V4.3 on June 30th 2014, mostly for better Haswell support.

Keep that in mind with this board. I got this exact board from Microcenter with the G3258 launch, and out of the box, it did NOT support the CPU. Wouldn't even boot, just a black screen, tried a different PCIe videocard and different memory to be safe.

I swapped in my 4670K from my other PC and it booted right up. Flashed BIOS, and lots of thermal grease cleanup later, the G3258 booted.

Pretty amazing Microcenter would offer a bundle of the G3258 with an incompatible (out of the box) board. YMMV on revisions, of course, but my Z97 Mate had the launch BIOS. So you may need a first gen haswell or second-gen i5/i7. I don't know why the microcode of the G3258 is incompatible with the initial BIOS release.

The board actually 'feels' really good for an MSI. I haven't liked MSI boards since they were real garbage back in the Athlon64 era, but they've clearly come a long way. I have the G3258 running at 4.4GHz at 1.3v with an H55 closed loop cooler.

 

[bbhaag]

^^^Thanks for the heads up man much appreciated. I got bit in the ass by MSI before with this issue and ended up having to buy a new cpu just to get my board to boot.

Still a good deal though. I'm tempted to buy this just to have on standby to replace my aging PhenomII 965 system.:hmm: