MSI MSI-MPGZ690 MSI MPG Z690 Edge WiFi Gaming Motherboard B (Open Box)

My first time using MSI in a while and I'm not particularly happy. Up until the most recent BIOS as of the date of this review, I needed upwards of 1.5VDDQ to even boot past 3700Mbps DDR4 RAM, which still ended up being unstable. 3600 was on the brink of stability, and by 2023 standards is extremely slow. It's fixed now, but they introduced a bug where you can't raise the uncore ratio past 45x (it sets in BIOS but in Windows it's 4500MHz). The options to disable audio, ethernet, and AHCI controllers don't work. If using CSM, you can't disable PXE option ROM, so even before you get the BIOS splash screen, PXE will load (by design), which is extremely annoying if you don't use PXE but have a device that supports it. The fan ramp up time is set to 0.1s by default, yet in reality it takes closer to 10s to ramp up, which isn't exactly a big deal if you have an AIO, but for tower coolers it is. The PCH temperature idles around 60C, which is unacceptable for a board of this price class. Removing the M.2 metal plate that covers it made no difference. During gaming where the GPU emitted a lot of heat, I saw the PCH hit 65C. This is without a side panel, by the way, so 75C+ with a side panel and GPU emitting a lot of heat I could easily see happening. I guess the pros are, this is the best VRM out of the DDR4 options (including Z790) due to its direct design, and it has the potential of being a great board if they sort out the BIOS bugs, which I'm not hopeful of considering how late into the release cycle it is (please prove me wrong). From what I've seen, the ASUS Strix-A series isn't having issues to this extent (but also costs quite a bit more, which after my experience I can now justify). Ironically the MSI Z690-A Pro isn't experiencing these issues since the vast majority of people are buying it, as opposed to these higher end boards which end up getting neglected. The vast majority of these high-star reviews are from people that buy the motherboard and end up never going into the BIOS, in which case they'd literally be better off with the cheaper Z690 A-Pro or even B660, which is frustrating as hell as these bugs don't get the light of day. It may sound like I'm being overly harsh, but the reality is that this would be one of, if not the best DDR4 boards if MSI fixed the bugs. Update: the board was exhibiting random restarts which I thought were due to my memory being unstable, but no, it ended up being a major fault which eventually manifested as the board frying itself and my 13700K. My power supply refused to power the board on even with every component disconnected for flashback. And on the motherboard I bought to replace it, my 13700K gave a red "CPU" light which went away as soon as I tried a 12600K, so my 13700K was killed. I RMA'd the board to see how MSI will handle the situation; as the processor was also fried due to the fault. I am beyond upset. Update again: I received the board from MSI repair and the motherboard still has random reboots (exactly what I was experiencing before the board fried itself and my 13700K). They mentioned nothing about the fact that my CPU was also fried, despite it being obvious the board had (and still has) a short. The support person lied and said something along the lines of "if they determine the CPU was fried due to the fault, it will be replaced." Also, the latest UEFI still has the 4500MHz uncore ratio limit bug.