

Supports RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 5 and RAID 10*** M.2 port supports 4.2cm/ 6cm/ 8cm length module M.2 port supports M.2 PCIe module up to 10Gb/s speed**

Supports Intel® Extreme Memory Profile (XMP)ģ x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, (support x16, x8/x8, x8/x4/x4 modes) Support four DDR3 3300 MHz DRAM, 32GB Max Supports 4th and 5th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors, and Intel® Pentium® and Celeron® Processors for Socket LGA1150 I’m excited to see what has changed and what remained the same!

With their new naming scheme we can tell right away that this is a gaming motherboard (of course) and the 5 is their entry level full ATX board with a 7 and a 9 that will round out the line. To start things off, today I will be taking a look at MSI’s Z97 Gaming 5. Even without new CPUs we can still take a look at the latest in motherboards. There are rumors of launch days for a Haswell refresh but as of now, there isn’t anything official. Typically, Intel keeps their chipset launches timed with new CPUs but todays (official) launch of the Z997 chipset does not come with shiny new silicon from Intel.
