The Box and Packaging
Included inside the box, you’ll find the usual installation guide, regulatory notices, 1 x SATA cable, and 1 x WiFi antenna, drivers CD, 2 spare M.2 screw mounts and a sheet of MSI stickers.
The MSI Z790 Project Zero Motherboard
The board uses a 6-Layer, 2oz thickened Copper PCB and comes in a nice black matte finish with silver heatsinks. It features a 14+1+1 duet rail power system, giving you excellent power efficiency and stability.
To help cool the VRMs, Mosfets and SSDs, the board comes with Extended heatsink, as well as M.2 Shield Frozr. There’s also a 7W/mK Thermal Pad & Additional Choke Pad, and Heavy Plated VRM Heatsinks on the motherboard.
There are 4 x DDR5 DIMM slots, supporting memory speeds of up to DDR5-7200+ OC. The motherboard uses dedicated SMT welding process, and features MSI Memory Boost technology to deliver the excellent memory performance.
A Closer Look
We now take a closer look at the main feature of the MSI Z790 Project Zero … all of the motherboard’s power connectors and pin-headers are now located on the reverse side of the board. The only connectors visible are the expansion slots, which include 1 x PCIE 5.0 x16 for next-gen graphics card, 1 x PCIE 4.0 x1 slot and 2 x PCIE 3.0 x16 slot.
As I mentioned earlier, this motherboard requires a chassis that’s compatible with MSI’s Project Zero. For a complete list of compatible cases, please visit MSI’s website. For our system build, we’ll be using the Corsair iCUE LINK 3500X RGB Mid-Tower chassis.
There’s a total of 8 x 4-pin fan headers on the board (5 at the top and 3 at the bottom), which is the most I’ve ever seen on a motherboard. For storage, it comes 6 x SATA ports and 4 x PCIE Gen4x4 M.2 slots for SSDs. These M.2 slots are covered by their M.2 Shield Frozr, which helps with cooling the SSDs.
On the back I/O panel, it’s jammed packed with connectors. These include the flash BIOS button, PS/2 keyboard & mouse, 4 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x HDMI port, 1 x DisplayPort, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen1 ports (blue), 1 x USB 3.2 Gen2 port (red), 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20GB/s Type-C), 1 x 2.5GB LAN port, WiFi 7 antenna, and an array of audio connectors including Line-out, Line-out and Mic-in.
