MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X Motherboard Review - Feature-Packed Performance

TweakTown's Rating: 91%

The Bottom Line

The MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X is an excellent option for enthusiasts looking to maximize performance without missing out on any of the key features the Z890 platform has to offer.

Pros

• Excellent memory overclocking
• Strong VRM
• Supports up to 12 storage devices
• Subtle design
• 320MHz Wi-Fi 7 and lots of fast USB & Thunderbolt 4

Cons

• $700 is a lot to ask
• Overkill for mainstream users
• No board-mounted power or reset buttons

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

MSI's Unify-X motherboards have established themselves as premium-tier options for users looking to extract every last drop of performance from a CPU and memory kit. With memory performance becoming important when it comes to maximizing Arrow Lake's gaming performance, a dual-DIMM board like the Unify-X is sure to appeal to tweakers looking to extract the maximum from the Z890 platform.

However, while performance is a critical pillar of any enthusiast system, a board's design, features, and options are important too. The MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X is a board that includes a full set of connectivity and expansion options that will appeal to users looking for not just a high-performance system but a feature-rich one, too. It will happily sit at the heart of a system and house a full set of equally high-capability components and peripherals.

Feature-wise, it's got almost everything you could want, short of halo-tier things like a fancy OLED screen or 10G LAN. You get Thunderbolt 4, 5G LAN, 320MHz Wi-Fi 7, and support for up to six M.2 slots plus six SATA ports. It's got loads of fast USB ports and 60W USB PD support. Arrow Lake might not have lit the world on fire, but an overclocked CPU and tweaked memory with a Z890 Unify-X at its heart, with a 4K monitor or three, and a high-end graphics card will still deliver lots of performance.

The MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X has a hefty recommended retail price of $699, which will limit its appeal to deep-pocketed enthusiasts only.

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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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The MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X comes in a fairly unremarkable box. You might not know it's an overclocking model by looking at it. In case you need reminding, AI is all the rage and there's a prominent warning on the dangers of swallowing a CR2032 battery should you be tempted to do so. Jokes aside, it's better to be aware of danger than not if you have kids.

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The rear of the box showcases some key features and specifications, giving a better indication of Unify X's powerful talents.

The Unify-X comes with a comprehensive set of accessories, as you'd expect from a board in this price range. There must be a dozen or more cables, including SATA, ARGB, and thermistor cables. You also get a myriad of M.2 SSD accessories, stickers, and a welcome card.

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The most attention-grabbing accessory is what MSI refers to simply as the Tuning Controller. It integrates features such as base clock control, OC retry and fail-safe buttons, and a clear CMOS button. There are also power and reset buttons and a debug LED readout. It connects to the motherboard via a dedicated header positioned at the bottom of the board.

It's quite useful, particularly the power and reset buttons and the debug LED. When performing our memory OC tests, it let us sit in a chair away from the motherboard without standing up and looking at the boot status via the board-mounted LED.

The trade-off is that the board itself lacks power and reset buttons, which should still be included on an overclocking board.

The Wi-Fi antenna is standard fare with a magnetic base, and a USB drive includes a set of drivers and utilities. The MSI Center is the software hub for all things related to the board. Frankly, a lot of the software packages are unnecessary, but at least they're optional.

The MSI website allows you to download an MSI-themed CPU-Z and AIDA64 Extreme.

Motherboard Overview

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The Z890 Unify-X features a predominantly black design with some mirror-like accents. It's attractive and should blend into a wide variety of build themes. It doesn't scream that it's a $700 motherboard. Not that that's a bad thing. Subtlety over tackiness is a definite virtue, particularly on a board built for high performance.

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A full backplate covers the rear of the board. It helps cool the VRM area's rear and adds rigidity to the board, making the Unify-X a heavy board indeed.

MSI clearly put a lot of engineering into the board. The PCB is packed with controllers and circuitry. It's far from a cut-and-paste of its other high-end Z890 boards. There's just one small ARGB section - well, two, actually, with a couple of small strips positioned on either side of the MSI dragon atop the rear I/O area. There are three ARGB headers, plus an RGB strip header, so if ARGB is your thing, you're well catered for.

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Other key headers include support for seven fan headers, the Tuning Controller header, a water flow connector header, and a pair of thermistor cable headers.

There are USB headers for a single 20Gbps Type-C, four 5Gbps Type-A, and four USB 2.0 ports. The 20Gbps port supports 60W PD, but to get that, you'll need to plug in a secondary 6-pin PCIe power connector, which is located next to the main 24-pin ATX power connector.

On the topic of power connectors, the Z890 Unify-X has an 8-pin PCIe power connector located at the bottom of the board. It won't be necessary for a typical single GPU system, but it'll be wise to use it if you're using two or three for compute work. If we assume a next-gen RTX 5090 will use up to four 8-pin connectors (for a 12V-2x6 adapter), plus the two needed for 60W PD and the auxiliary 8-pin, you're going to need a beefy PSU with a lot of PCIe connectors or an ATX 3.x model with native 16-pin support.

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Two DIMM slots support speeds of DDR5-9600+, with up to 128GB supported. That's interesting as the competing ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex only supports up to 96GB, though that may change with a future BIOS update. To reach such mega speeds, you'll need CUDIMMs.

Using a pair of 64GB sticks limits official support to DDR5-7200+, which is an impressive number compared to first-generation DDR5 boards. Such speeds with dual-rank modules were once a pipe dream.

Just prior to the release of Arrow Lake, we were unable to reach DDR5-9600 with a G.Skill CUDIMM kit, but a flurry of pre- and post-release BIOS updates from MSI allowed us to do so with our 285K. If you have a CPU with a good memory controller, DDR5-10000+ is no longer mythical, and the Z890 Unify-X is one of the few Z890 boards capable of it.

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The Z890 Unify-X comes with an excellent VRM solution consisting of 20+2+1+1 phases with 110A stages for the VCORE. That's fewer stages than MSI's own Ace and Godlike boards, which is a little surprising given that the Unify-X is much more likely to be used in extreme overclocking scenarios. Still, it's more than sufficient to push a 285K to its limits and beyond.

You'd expect an overclocking board to come with beastly VRM heatsinks, and that is certainly the case with the Z890 Unify-X. We recorded a peak VRM temperature of 58 degrees Celsius. Suffice it to say that your CPU cooling will limit you well before the VRM breaks a sweat.

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The Z890 Unify-X comes with a whopping six PCB-mounted M.2 slots. The board's two-DIMM design allowed MSI to squeeze another one in next to the memory slots. You also get six SATA ports, meaning the Unify-X is one of the few Z890 motherboards that can support up to 12 storage devices.

The primary PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot is next to the memory slots. I really wish this would become a standard placement for the primary drive, as it moves it away from the graphics card and into the path of front-to-back case airflow. But sadly, that isn't possible on four DIMM motherboards due to the space constraints of an ATX motherboard.

The primary slot has what you call a small heatsink, but despite that, it still kept our Teamgroup PCIe 5.0 drive under 55 degrees. The ASUS Z890 Apex and ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite can only match that, even though the surface area of both boards' M.2 heatsinks is much larger.

The second CPU-connected drive features a similarly compact heatsink, while a large detachable plate cools the other four. MSI's M.2 heatsink retention mechanisms are very good. They are easy to detach while remaining extremely rigid when attached.

The board includes three PCIe x16 slots and a single x1 slot. As with all Z890 motherboards, they won't run at full speed when all are populated. The two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots share 16 lanes between them, supporting x16, x8/x8, or x8/x4/x4 when a second PCIe 5.0 SSD is installed.

The third x16 slot is wired to the chipset and supports PCIe 4.0 x4 devices electrically.

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The Z890 Unify-X's rear I/O panel is chock full. In fact, there's little room to include anything else, even if MSI wanted to.

The USB complement includes dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports with DP support, two more Type-C 10 Gbps ports, and eight Type-A 10Gbps ports.

MSI included a pair of old-school PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports for chasing records. Competitive overclockers can completely disable the USB ports, freeing up valuable CPU cycles and boosting efficiency.

MSI opted for an Intel Killer E5000B controller for the single 5G LAN port and a Killer BE1750X Wi-Fi 7 controller. This controller supports 320MHz connections and up to 5.8Gbps of bandwidth. Many cheaper boards are limited to 160MHz connections. You also get Bluetooth 5.4 support.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC4080 codec drives these. The Unify-X includes several enhancements, including high-quality capacitors, a dedicated headphone amplifier, and de-pop protection.

Finally, we come to the bank of three buttons in the middle. These include a CMOS clear button and a BIOS flashback button. We can only hope that Intel will soon confirm that the LGA 1851 socket will support another CPU generation, as it would be a kick in the guts for users buying such a board for just one CPU generation.

The third button is what MSI calls the Smart Button. It can be programmed to do useful things like toggle the RGB on or off, reset the system in safe mode, or set the speed of all fans to full speed.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

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The Z890 Unify-X features the company's redesigned Click BIOS X UEFI interface. This is a big change, considering the previous design remained mostly unchanged for over a decade.

It's a nice-looking design. Upon entering the BIOS, you'll be in the default EZ mode, which features all of the basic set-and-forget settings you might need. Fundamental settings such as enabling XMP, auto overclocking, power profiles, and boot device priorities can be found here.

But this isn't a board you'd buy for the EZ mode. The advanced mode is where the magic happens, and all of the key settings related to overclocking can be found on these pages. The main pages can be accessed by moving the mouse to the left side of the page.

Test System

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to showcase their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of a tested CPU.

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The MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X returned solid Cinebench results. These scores show off Arrow Lake at its best. The 285K's E-cores really add a lot of multi-threading grunt.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU like a Core Ultra 9 285K. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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The motherboard makes little difference in our Blender test; the result of 396 seconds is nearly exactly the same as that on the other Z890 boards we've tested so far.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

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The 285K is an excellent chip for rendering and encoding, and we see it again here. The MSI's result is only a hair behind the ASUS Maximus Apex.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's influenced by memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A result of 190.3 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark puts it right in the middle of the three boards.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs; however, Arrow Lake is far less impressive in that regard. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but more significant margins, particularly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.

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The 285K's memory latency performance is a weak point of the new architecture, but a decent DDR5-7200 kit such as the G.Skill one we use for testing shaves a good 10ns off of what you'd expect from a DDR5-6000 kit. The MSI again sits in the middle of the tested boards.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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For some reason, the ASUS Apex did particularly well in this test. Not that you'd buy a $700 motherboard like the Z890 Unify-X solely for productivity work.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game. This test is the same as running the actual game without the inconsistencies inherent in application testing.

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This result is interesting as the MSI is noticeably ahead here. This could be due to the positioning of the primary M.2 slot, which is uncommonly positioned adjacent to the memory slots.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The MSI puts in a strong showing here with a solid lead, although the differences between the boards are still minor.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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The tested boards are all within a margin of error, but it's better to lead the pack rather than trail it.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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The Unify-X is a decent performer here, too, leading both the average and minimum FPS results.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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That makes it three gaming wins from three for the MSI and four if you count 3DMark Timespy Extreme. That minimum FPS result again looks excellent.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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It was surprising to see the MSI fall a little behind in the VRM thrash test, although 58 Degrees Celsius is still a very good result compared to cheaper boards and nowhere near the limits of what the VRM cooling is capable of.

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It's 55 degrees all around here. Again, this is surprising, but in a good way. The MSI's primary M.2 heatsink has nowhere near the surface area of most premium boards, but its location away from the graphics card clearly helps it keep a PCIe 5.0 SSD well within spec.

Final Thoughts

There's no getting around the fact that the Arrow Lake launch was underwhelming. With future microcode updates and Windows tweaks, we may see some of that underwhelming gaming performance improve. In the meantime, overclocking and tweaking will definitely help to boost performance with a K-series processor.

That's where a board like the MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X will help. It's a fantastic board for those who want to squeeze every last drop of performance from a CPU and memory kit. But, with the AMD Ryzen 9800X3D impressing, will many users opt for a Core Ultra CPU and a $700 motherboard? The Unify-X will remain a niche product, but it's a heck of a lot of fun to play with.

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Whether you're looking to push a high-spec kit with a Gear 2 setting or try to push through that 10,000 MT/s barrier with a CUDIMM kit, it'll be hard to go wrong with the Z890 Unify-X. We aren't quite able to reach such speeds yet, but it may be that our 285K sample is just not able to do it on air cooling without resorting to crazy voltages.

The MSI isn't a one-trick pony, though. The company equipped the board with a complete set of functionality and connectivity options. At the same time, its subtle look will make it easy to blend into a wide variety of system themes and colors.

Feature-wise, you get Thunderbolt 4, PCIe 5.0 GPU and SSD support, 5G LAN, and 320MHz Wi-Fi 7. Six M.2 slots and six SATA ports make it among the most capable boards for those with many drives. Add a very strong VRM that can easily power any Arrow Lake CPU, even under liquid nitrogen cooling. A more worldly end user will have everything they can reasonably expect without paying silly money for the halo-tier flagship motherboards.

Still, it's a $700 motherboard, and that limits its appeal. It's one for the deep-pocketed hardcore Intel enthusiast only. The same can be said for the ASUS Maximus Z890 Apex, AORUS Tachyon, or ASRock OC Formula. Such boards are desirable but remain niche products at such prices.

If you've got the money, though, you'll be happy with the MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X. It's an overclocking and performance-oriented option, but it still manages to cram in lots of ease-of-use features, connectivity options, and storage potential for Intel enthusiasts looking for a motherboard with high performance and impressive all-around appeal.