MSI MEG Z890 Godlike Motherboard Review

There has been a land rush in motherboard designs to occupy every open board locations with locations for M.2 slots.  While these are technically PCI Express expansion slots they only work with M.2 compatible devices such as NVMe SSDs.  The Z890 Godlike supports a total of eight M.2 NVMe drives and the expansion slot layout has been modified to maximize drive support.

The Z890 Godlike does come with a total of three expansion slots and many these share bandwidth with M.2 slots so be sure to consult the manual to ensure you are using the slots correctly.

MSI has been using an EZ Latch system on their M.2 heatsinks allowing the user to simply press the metal latch and lift the entire heatisnk away without needing a screwdriver. 

Removing the two dedicated heatsinks will expose every onboard M.2 drive slot.  Given the layout I am rather impressed with the overall layout and ability to support six M.2 slots onboard with three traditional expansion slots.

The topmost M,2 slot is PCI Express Gen5 direct from the CPU and features one of the largest heatsinks on the motherboard. 

Removing that heatsink will espose the factory thermal pads along with a set of pogo pin pads to control the ARGB lights.

You will find similar pin pads under the larger heatsink and even more thermal pads.

The two final M.2 slots are supported through an expansion card called the M.2 Xpander-Z Slider.  This device allows users to remove and replace NVMe SSDs using a hot swap style drive cage with dedicated cooling.  To support both drives you will need to enable bifurcation in the MSI Godlike UFEI and then populate both drive cartridges.

While removing the drives is extremely easy, there is some effort to installing the drive into the cartridge.  You’ll need a screwdriver for this part but, is a convenient way to swap and change storage options on a build that may not provide you access to the large M.2 heatsink or, in instances where you need to support more Gen5 drives.