MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition Review - A feature-complete flagship for the ultra enthusiast

TweakTown Rating: 92%

Our Verdict

For those who want the best the AMD AM5 platform has to offer, the MSI X870E Godlike X delivers. But you might need to sell a kidney to afford it.

Pros

• Up to seven M.2 slots
• Lots of fast USB ports, including seven Type-C
• 10G and 5G LAN
• Dynamic Dashboard display
• Cable management features

Cons

• Wallet-destroying price!
• Only four SATA

Should you buy it?

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Buy at Amazon for $1899.99 USD

Buy at Amazon for £1199.93

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

It's always a privilege to have hands-on time with a flagship product, and there are few products that are as unmistakably high-end as an MSI Godlike motherboard. They are designed to be the most feature-rich and beautiful-looking motherboards that money can buy, and if looks are any indicator, the MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition is another beastly addition to the Godlike legacy.

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The MEG X870E Godlike X Edition is a special edition celebrating 10 years of Godlike boards, dating back to the X99A Godlike Gaming, which debuted in 2015. MSI will produce just 1000 units, each identified by a numbered nameplate. Exclusive indeed.

Anyone familiar with MSI's Godlike boards will know that they come at a price. At over $1,600, the potential market is tiny. Unless you have equally high-end hardware such as an RTX 5090 and Ryzen 9 processor, this is not a motherboard for you.

Of course, the MEG X870E Godlike X Edition supports AMD AM5 Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 series CPUs. It supports up to 256GB of memory and features a VRM that can power any AM5 CPU, now or in the future. But these basics don't even scratch the surface of what this board has to offer.

With perhaps one or two exceptions, the X870E Godlike X has the best of everything. You get 10G and 5G LAN, 320MHz WiFi 7, seven (!) M.2 slots, lots of fast USB ports, including no less than seven Type-C ports, a premium audio codec with DAC, lots of build-friendly features and an incredible array of value-adding accessories.

MSI seems to have taken some inspiration from its Project Zero backside connector family. While the Godlike X is not a backside-connected board, nearly all the important connectors and headers are on the board's side, making cable management much easier. The last thing you want with a board like this is cables running every which way. It's a board for a showpiece PC.

Further Socket AM5 Reading – Our Latest Reviews

• Sapphire Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 review - Welcome back to the motherboard market!
• ASRock Phantom Gaming X870 Nova WiFi review - Delivering a solid core feature set
• MSI MPG B850I Edge Ti WiFi Motherboard Review

The MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition will set you back an eye-watering $1,659. If you add an RTX 5090, a 9950X3D and - if you are genuinely rich- 256GB of RAM, then it's clear that this is a board for those with very deep pockets only.

Best Deals: MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$1899.99 USD	-	$1299.99 USD	Buy
	-	$1999.98 CAD	$1936.24 CAD	Buy
	£1199.93	£1281.66	£1273.50	Buy
	$1899.99 USD	-	$1299.99 USD	Buy
* Prices last scanned 12/14/2025 at 2:46 pm CST - prices may be inaccurate. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We earn affiliate commission from any Newegg or PCCG sales.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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The X870E Godlike X box is the biggest I have come across in over ten years of reviewing motherboards. It's comparable in size to a mid-tower case box.

The box shown here ships in a sleeve with Godlike branding.

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The rear of the box provides a complete list of all the key features and specifications. And there are a lot!

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You can tell MSI spared no expense by the attention to detail here. All of the accessories are very securely packed and will be hard for any careless courier to damage.

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You can see the hinges that swing outwards to reveal the board within. When fully extended, this box is well over a meter in width.

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The X870E Godlike X comes with a set of accessories that few, if any, other boards can match. There's a lot to cover.

A highlight is the M.2 Xpander-Z Slider Gen 5 PCIe 5.0 add-in card. This PCIe 5.0 x8 card supports up to two PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs. It's a single-slot card, and as you can see in the picture above, it has a very large surface area and a cooling fan.

It has a 6-pin PCIe power connector to power the two drives.

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The EZ-Control hub is a convenient device designed to reduce cable clutter. It's powered by an included SATA power adapter and connects using an MSI EZ-Bridge cable to a dedicated header on the board. It supports up to seven fan headers plus a 12V/3A water pump header. You also get two ARGB headers and a 12V RGB header.

Using this device is essentially mandatory, as the board has only three fan headers and a single ARGB header.

The rear is magnetized and can be hidden out of the way behind the motherboard tray. It will really help with cable management. Any builder using this board will appreciate that.

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As the board is limited to 1000 examples, each X870E Godlike X Edition comes with a unique number between 1 and 1000. For our sample, MSI treated us to a unique TweakTown version, which is located atop one of the SSD heatsinks. Thanks, MSI!

This heatsink can be placed inside the bundled collector's case. It's powered by an included USB Type-A to Type-C cable. A button switches an 'X-Edition' logo between a set of static RGB colours or rainbow RGB colours.

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Next up is a small MSI Dragon plush toy that's also a keychain with a few little trinkets attached. I'm not sure I'd want all that in my pocket with a bunch of keys attached, but who doesn't like a little plushie!

Finally, there are probably a dozen or more cables. They include a 3-to-1 ARG cable, ARGB extension cable, 3-to-1 Ez-Conn cable that combines USB 2.0, fan and ARGB into one, accessory connection cables, SATA cables and a pair of thermistor cables.

And that's not the end of it. You get M.2 thermal pads, screws for the EZ-Control hub, a USB drive with drivers and utilities, a set of stickers and the usual quick installation guide and regulatory notices.

There's a lot there, and we haven't yet even gotten to the motherboard itself...

Motherboard Overview

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Every square millimetre of the X870E Godlike X leaves you with no doubt that this is a premium motherboard. The design is largely unchanged from the original X870E Godlike, with the addition of some extra gold highlights.

There are three RGB sections, or four if you count the LED screen to the right of the RAM slots.

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Most of the important headers and connectors have been placed along the side of the board in an area MSI calls the EZ Bridge. The cover is magnetically held in place. The BIOS battery can also be found here. By placing all of the important headers here, it allows a user to hide almost all unsightly cables. Other than the dual-8-pin EPS connectors, there are a pair of SATA ports hidden underneath a small magnetic panel. It will need to be removed if you use them.

The EZ Control hub connects here, which provides extra fan and ARGB headers. The board offers ten fan headers in total.

The USB header complement is very good, and is sure to be limited by the number of ports supported by your case. There are a total of four USB 2.0 ports, four 5Gbps ports, a 10Gbps Type-C port and a 20Gbps Type-C port. The latter supports 60W Power Delivery when the auxiliary 8-pin PCIe power connector is inserted to its right.

Combined with the ports on the back panel, the X870E Godlike X supports up to 25 USB devices.

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The Dynamic Dashboard display supports a wide range of functionality, including system monitoring, a debug display, a clock or custom images. At the lower left side of the display, you'll find power and reset buttons, and a PCIe release button.

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Four DIMM slots support DDR5-8400+ (or DDR5-9000 MT/s with a Ryzen 8000 processor) and a maximum capacity of 256GB. Few will buy such kits in the current climate, but those that do are unlikely to baulk at the price of the X870E Godlike X.

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The X870E Godlike X features a 24+2+1 phase VRM with 110A stages. With thousands of Amps available, it's very safe to say the board will handle everything you throw at it, even with liquid nitrogen cooling.

The board's VRM heatsinks are excellent. I am always happy to see true finned designs, which add a lot of surface area. They can be aesthetically pleasing, as it is here. Our test with a 10-minute Cinebench R24 loop resulted in a peak VRM temperature of just 53 degrees Celsius, the lowest we've seen on an 800-series motherboard.

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The X870E Godlike X has five PCB-mounted M.2 slots. M.2_1 and M.2_2 support PCIe 5.0 drives. The others all support PCIe 4.0 x4, with the M.2_4 slot supporting up to x2. Of course, with the bundled Xpander card, the board supports a total of seven M.2 drives! That's mega.

There are four SATA ports. I understand that SATA is losing favour these days, but a board at this level should probably support six or eight ports, as they are natively supported by the chipset already.

The board includes two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots plus one PCIe 4.0 x4 slot. The primary slot supports PCIe 5.0 x16 devices and is reinforced for heavy graphics cards. The second x16 slot is electrically x8. Both are wired to the CPU, while the x4 slot is connected to the chipset.

The layout is good, as it allows you to use a very large graphics card, the Xpander card and another PCIe card all at the same time.

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I don't think it's possible to pack a rear I/O with more than this, given chipset lane limitations and the currently available consumer-tier technologies. The X870E Godlike has the lot.

We'll begin with the USB complement, which starts with dual USB4 Type-C ports, both of which support DP 1.4a. The USB4 ports are joined by no fewer than 13 (!) 10Gbps ports, five of which are Type-C.

There's dual LAN, consisting of Realtek 8126 5G and Marvell AQC113CS 10G controllers. These are joined by a MediaTek MT7927 WiFi 7 controller, which supports 320MHz connections and speeds of up to 5.8Gbps, with Bluetooth 5.4 support.

Next are the audio ports, which include 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. These are driven by a Realtek ALC4082 codec with an ESS9219Q Combo DAC/HPA. You won't find much better than that unless you go with a discrete sound card.

Finally, there's the bank of three buttons in the centre of the I/O panel. These are a CMOS clear button and a BIOS flashback button, which will come in handy for those installing a future-generation processor. The third button is called the Smart Button, and it can be set to toggle the RGB on or off, reset the system or boot into safe mode.

Ignoring impractical enterprise tier features such as 25GbE or SFP connectors, the X870E Godlike X's I/O capabilities are as good as it gets.

UEFI and Test System

UEFI

With its 800 series motherboards, MSI introduced a new UEFI design. Considering MSI's UEFI design has remained mostly the same since the Intel Z68 days, it is a welcome upgrade.

It combines the simplicity of old-school BIOS layouts with a fresh design that's easy on the eye, with attractive fonts and contrast. The hardware monitoring page, in particular, is very well designed.

Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench 2024 is a reliable, widely used benchmark that measures both single and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates.

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The X870E Godlike X performed well, achieving 2,308 in the nT test and 140 in the 1T test. The nT result is strong for a Ryzen 9 9950X with our test settings.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user might consider a high-core-count CPU, such as the Ryzen 9 9950X. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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A result of 427 seconds put the X870E Godlike X at the top of the chart, even if a couple of seconds over a seven-minute test is minuscule.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result indicates the task will take less time to complete.

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A result of 160.4 FPS puts the X870E Godlike X in the lead.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's very sensitive to changes in memory speed and latency, and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A score of 229.48 BIPS is another strong result for the Godlike X.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has been an area where Intel has traditionally held an advantage. Chiplet architectures inevitably add some latency compared to monolithic chips. The real-world benefits aren't that important, though.

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71.0 nanoseconds puts the X870E Godlike X mid-pack in this test.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs solely for leisure, but some of us have to work too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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Ultimately, all the tested boards are within a couple of percent of one another.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game.

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The X870E Godlike X is within a whisker of topping the chart.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favour as a graphics benchmark in favour of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The differences between the boards are minor, with only a few hundred points separating them when measured by CPU score.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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It's no surprise that the motherboard makes little difference in graphically limited scenarios.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favour performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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The differences here are negligible in percentage terms. If you're lucky enough to own an RTX 5090, the margins would be a little larger.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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All the tested motherboards perform essentially identically. Of the three gaming tests, the Godlike X is a consistently high performer.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. Each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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A peak temperature of just 53 degrees is a testament to the effectiveness of finned heatsinks. The extra surface area really does help. And, with such an over-spec VRM design, the demands of a Ryzen 9 9950X are laughed off by the X870E Godlike X.

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The X870E Godlike X falls a little behind the boards at the top of the chart here. While the primary SSD heatsink is chunky, it lacks a little surface area, and it's surely not helped by the built-in RGB and its associated circuitry.

Final Thoughts

It's been a real pleasure to spend a few days playing with the MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition. While the mid-range motherboard market is flooded with options, the top end is much more rarefied. In previous years, Godlike boards had no real competition, but now boards like the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS Extreme X3D AI Top have entered the picture with similar feature sets.

At $1,659, the X870E Godlike X won't even be considered by most DIY PC builders. It exists more as a showpiece, which is why it's limited to just 1,000 units worldwide. It's like MSI management gave the engineers and designers a blank cheque and said: 'Go for it, boys and girls.'

The end result is a board that lacks very little. It supports seven M.2 drives. It's got 10G and 5G LAN, a lovely LCD display, a complete set of value-adding accessories, loads of fast USB ports, and an absolutely mega VRM and cooling.

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The board proved to be a strong performer as well. Though in reality, the motherboard makes little difference when all other components are equal. Add to that an easy-to-navigate UEFI and lots of build-friendly features, and there is nothing of note to complain about.

I'd still like to see six to eight SATA ports for those with lots of data in cold storage, and a few might want dual 10G LAN for network attached storage, but apart from that, it has basically every conceivable feature that can be included on a 2025 consumer motherboard with current PCIe lane limitations.

If money is no object, then the MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition is worth considering. Add a 9950X or 9950X3D, RTX 5090 and lots of RAM, and you'll have the ultimate 2025 PC. Just make sure you have a case large enough to hold it, and that it has a window to show it off. It's the ultimate PC enthusiast motherboard for those who demand the best.