Board Layout and Pictures

As we saw with the full ATX Z170 motherboard from MSI that I covered at launch, MSI has changed up the styling of their Gaming Series motherboards. They still have the same red and black theme that MSI and Asus use but MSI changed the red color to a brighter red. Typically companies try to hide the traces in the PCB but MSI actually highlighted some of them on the flat black PCB with red. This combined with the red on both heatsinks makes the Z170I Gaming Pro AC pop a little. I think going with red DIMMS would add to it a little but they kept them and all of the other connections blacked out. Being a Mini-ITX board there isn’t all that much to the board, it all fits into a 6-inch square PCB, a small portion of the size of a full ATX or even Micro-ATX board.

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Starting up in the top left corner behind the rear I/O panel the board has two 4-pin PWM fan headers. They have printed on the chip behind the Ethernet port to highlight that it is the Gaming LAN chip and of course we have the power circuitry just above the LGA socket.

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Over on the top right the 8-pin CPU power plug is tucked in to the right of the power heatsink, this is normally up in the top left corner but I think that this location is actually a little earlier to get to than normal. There are two DDR4 DIMMs and then along the edge is the boards 24-pin power. Just below that is the front panel controls header. This is normally in the bottom right corner on most boards but due to the space of the ITX board the Z170I Gaming Pro AC has it just under the 24-pin power. This actually puts all three of the board main connections up in the one area so wire management should be a little earlier.

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Moving down the right side we have one SATA Express port and then two normal SATA 3 ports tucked in between the chipset cooler and the DDR4 DIMMs. The last connection down in the bottom right corner is the boards one USB 3.0 header.

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Down along the bottom the Z170I Gaming Pro AC has a single PCI Express x16 slot like every ITX board and then they have the Audio Boost 3 chip tucked in just next to it. MSI went with high end caps but a few less than you would see on a full sized board. They have them packed tightly in next to the included Bluetooth and wireless AC card that runs on mSATA. In with the caps is also the headphone amp chip in the top right corner where the eight cap would go. The front panel audio port is just above the caps. This is the worst possible place you could have to deal with as far as wiring goes but there really aren’t many options on an ITX board when its packed full of features. Then there is a single USB 2.0 header just above the front panel audio header.

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Being such a small board there isn’t exactly a lot of room for cooling. The Z170i Gaming Pro AC does still have two main heatsinks. The one above the CPU socket helps keep the power circuitry cool. It doesn’t have a large footprint and it is packed up next to the CPU power but it does have a decent amount of surface area with multiple fins and cuts in the aluminum cooler. It is anodized black with two red strips on it. The second cooler is a lot lower profile and sits just above the PCI slot. This is the chipset cooler, normally these are low profile because they run under the video card but in this case it doesn’t. It is smaller than the coolers on full sized boards but the same as what I’ve seen on past ITX boards. The heatsink has a black base with a few angled gaps in it then a thin aluminum plate over top of it that has all of the decorations printed on it including the MSI logo.

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For being a Mini-ITX board the Z170I Gaming Pro AC has a lot going on in its rear I/O panel. Not as much as the Asus Impact boards but close. There are two USB 2.0 ports along with a PS2 port for legacy devices over on the left. Then you get four normal USB 3.0 ports and the vertical USB 3.0 port that has additional power to it for USB audio power. That one also has a gold housing, not that it’s needed. For display connections the board has a single HDMI and a single DisplayPort, being a gaming board I’m sure more people will be using a video card but it’s nice to have the option at least. Over on the right is the 5 port audio panel and an optical connection. All of the audio ports are gold plated and the single red one is the port with the built in headphone amp. Next to that are the connectors for the Wireless AC/Bluetooth adapter and also with those is a tiny button for resetting the BIOS without having to dig into your tiny ITX build. I can’t stress enough how helpful that CMOS button can be but anyone who has ever wired up a small form factor build will understand why you might not want to have to dig back into it often. The last port is the gig Ethernet connection in the middle. The NIC is running on an Intel I219-V Gigabit LAN chipset, I was a little surprised they didn’t go with a Killer NIC seeing they are in most MSI Gaming Series boards but I’m guessing they just didn’t have the room.

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The last thing to check out on the Z170I Gaming Pro AC is the underside of the board. This is where we can actually get a better look at the black PCB. MSI slipped all of the required logos here on the back of the board rather than trying to pack them on the top. We can see that the top heatsink is attached by screws. But the most interesting thing going on here is that MSI actually took advantage of the unused space of the back of the PCB and slipped the boards only M.2 slot onto the PCB. This idea comes from the small form factor PCs like the NUC where they use every inch front and back on the PCBs. It’s especially genius because the only other way to fit an M.2 drive on a Mini-ITX board is to go vertical with it like Asus did on their Impact boards. The problem with that is that cuts into wiring and can have conflicts depending on your case layout. This design will work with anything; the only issue is you will need to most likely remove the motherboard to get at the drive or to install one later.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #37566 16 Jan 2016 02:20
Today I check out the Z170I Gaming Pro AC from MSI, their gaming focused Mini-ITX board
VaporX's Avatar
VaporX replied the topic: #37567 16 Jan 2016 02:38
I have reached the point I do not like the "gaming" motherboards. You can often get the same performance, minus a little overclocking potential for as much as 30% less, especially in ITX format.

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