You know you are a geek when new motherboards get you excited, or maybe it’s the fun of building a new PC, who knows.
In all seriousness, people often underestimate the impact a motherboard upgrade can have. In the right system, it can be the difference between a stuttery 45fps experience and a locked 60fps gameplay session, all without replacing the GPU itself.
The MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi6E isn’t aimed at high-end overclockers, it’s aimed at enthusiasts who actually care about solid power delivery, fast storage support, and enough modern connectivity to keep a gaming rig relevant for years to come.
Visually, MSI has kept things understated with Matte black heatsinks, dark PCB tones, and minimal silver accents. It looks like gaming hardware for adults rather than something that screams “I’m a gamer!” This cleaner aesthetic works surprisingly well inside modern tempered glass builds because it lets the rest of your hardware take the limelight. Throw in a big RTX card, some tasteful lighting, and suddenly the motherboard becomes part of the build rather than vying for the centre of attention.
This motherboard is based on Intel’s new LGA1851 platform, with support for the latest Core Ultra processors sitting front and centre. What immediately stands out, though, is how user-friendly the board feels during setup. MSI’s EZ DIY features continue to be genuinely useful, with the M.2 installation system being far less annoying than older screw-based implementations. It sounds trivial until you are halfway through a build, swapping SSDs at 2 am.
Gaming boards live and die by power delivery and thermals, ensuring your gaming hardware can perform optimally. MSI’s 14+1+1+1 Duet Rail power system, paired with chunky heatsinks, gives the Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi6E the kind of thermal and power stability that lets modern Intel chips stretch their legs properly under sustained gaming loads. Throughout the benchmark process, the VRM cooling remained impressively composed.
Memory support is equally aggressive, with DDR5 speeds pushing well beyond what most gamers will realistically install in their rigs. More precisely, its DDR5 support stretches from the standard 4800MT/s baseline all the way up to an eye-watering 9200MT/s through overclocking.
In reality, very few gaming rigs will ever run memory at those extremes, but that’s great for upgradability. What really matters is the amount of breathing room the platform gives you. The board’s sweet spot is around the 6400MT/s to 7200MT/s range, with Intel XMP support handling most of the heavy lifting.
Storage support is another area where this board will give you the best of both worlds. You get one PCIe Gen5 M.2 while there are three more Gen4 slots for your older drives. Considering how insanely large modern game installs have become, this is a win for budget-conscious gamers.
As its name implies, the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi 6 supports WiFi 6, but it should be noted that a Wifi 7 version of this motherboard is also available on the market. This WiFi6 variant is aimed at gamers who don’t want to pay the premium for Wifi 7.
WiFi 6E is already fast enough to saturate the majority of users’ fibre connections. Combined with 5G LAN onboard, you are covered and connected as a mid-range gamer.
Looking at how this motherboard performs, I paired it with the excellent mid-range Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus CPU. Now, if you know your CPUs, you’ll know that this version has built-in graphics support, which means that you do not need a discrete graphics card to set up or run your system. Just plug your HDMI or DisplayPort cable directly into the motherboard, and you are good to go. You can even play basic games with these integrated graphics capabilities.
For the benchmarks, I did not focus on any graphics capabilities but rather focused on the CPU/RAM performance to give you an idea of what this motherboard is capable of.
Benchmark Results
3Dmark
CPU Max Threads: 15,258
Storage Benchmark: 2,635
Geekbench
Single-core: 3,076
Multi-core: 19,205
Cinebench
CPU (Multiple threads): 6,997
CPU (Single thread): 588
The MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi6E is not trying to be the loudest motherboard on the shelf, just a solid piece of tech to keep you gaming. At R5,999, it sits within reach of most mid-range budgets, allowing you to spend your money on a better CPU, NVMe storage, graphics card, or DDR5 RAM. If you are building a new rig, this motherboard makes for a great foundation to build your gaming rig on.
