MSI MEG Z490 Ace Preview

Up Close – Packaging and Contents

The MSI packaging on their Gaming products – the ones with the Dragon logo – are really gorgeous and the Ace is no exception with a subtle nod to the gold without becoming gaudy. A delicate balancing act.

The RGB infrastructure has taken over the gaming world, so providing us with extension cables for our LED strips is one of the things we’re happiest to see happen with the latest generation of motherboards.

The Godlike went for braided cables but the Ace sticks to the tried and tested plastic coated SATA cables. If you’re anything like us they are so well hidden behind your chassis we probably couldn’t tell you what ours looked like, so this is more than fine with us.

We’ve spoken a lot about how amusing we find it that all the big three manufacturers have the same design of WiFi antenna, but given how attractive it is and how well it works, it makes perfect sense.

Lastly the Corsair RGB suite is extremely popular and this cable lets you extend that particular manufacturers products, should you so require.

Probably the most surprising thing to us is that the Ace still uses a DVD for the drivers, particularly given that a lot of the higher end models we’ve seen so far have moved to USB storage. Given how cheap the USB drives must be when you’re buying in the bulk that the big manufacturers do we don’t think it’s a cost saving exercise.