MSI has shown their MEG Z690 Unify ITX motherboard, and it looks like it has serious potential. Aside from supporting for the latest Intel 12th Gen Core processors, this ITX board has a full three M.2 slots.
When it comes to most typical ITX motherboards, you will usually find one or two M.2 slots. Having a full three slots opens up a lot of storage and modding possibilities that would otherwise require sacrificing storage. Keep in mind that these are full PCI-E 5.0 slots, so a single x4 M.2 slot is equivalent to a x8 PCI-E 4.0 slot, or x16 PCI-E 3.0 slot. PCI-E 3.0 x16 is still considered enough for even the highest-end GPUs. In theory, you could run additional GPUs, sound cards, capture cards, and a plethora of other devices through these M.2 slots if you use an adapter.
Or just stuff a reasonably priced extra 2TB M.2 storage drive in there instead of paying an insane amount for a 4GB or 8GB model.*
(*If you’re reading this in the future, 4TB NVME drives are way more than double the cost of a 2TB drive at the time of writing. 8TB drives require signing away your first born child because daddy NEEDS his music collection that dates back to Napster on local storage, damn it! But I digress… )
The ITX Unify also features DDR5 support for up to 6800 Mhz, 105 AMP smart power stage VRMs with active cooling (fan), and an aluminum back plate on the rear of the board.
Other features include a 20Gbps front USB port, twin 40Gbps Thunderbolt ports on the rear, 2.5Gbps LAN port, four rear 4Gbps USB ports, two rear 10Gbps USB ports, HDMI out, Displayport out, and two mini-display port out connectors. Wireless support is WiFi 6E.
That’s a lot of features for such a small board. While the MSI product page is not yet active, you can check out the announcement video below.
Pricing and availability have not been listed as of writing.
