that's something you've got to decide, ie in terms of value to you. M.2 drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and mobo mfgrs seem to be cutting back on sata ports - most now seem to only have six - my x99 Asrock had 10 and i used 9 of them
in two weeks, i've gone thru 2 mobos, Gig Aorus Master - bios chip corrupted, but looking back on it, it was defective from the start. Gig tech svc were super, even if the asian accent made it difficult to understand the tech - but it was like watching a slow motion train wreck. Before that it was the Asrock Taichi Z390 - that one fried itself and a i9-9900k cpu after downloading and flashing the latest BIOS release (was 4 days old when i flashed it). After flashing, never got past POST, and we determined it had fried the CPU's graphic side or graphics instruction sets. After it fried it, i was researching on the web and there a few other posters complaining about that same BIOS, and then one poster came into my thread here and he had the exact same thing happen to his, fried mobo and cpu, on the same BIOS
Asrock has since pulled that BIOS off their website altogether, but it kind of pissed me off they'd rush a BIOS update out like that.
I'm now on a MSI Z390 MEG ACE - of the three, the GIg had the appearance of the highest phsyical quality, ie components especially the VRM heatsink with cooling fins.. THe Taichi had the 2nd best appearance, still it was a little tacky, the silkscreened "gears / sprockets" looked like decals in real life. The MSI in person looks the tackiest but it's running flawlessly, the BIOS GUI was equal to if not nicer than the Asrock's. The GIg's BIOS GUI left a little to be desired, a little rudimentary, definitely not intuitive - to make changes in values, up or down, in some settings you use the "pg down/pg up" buttons - nowhere in the manual did it state that.
BUt there's something else going on with the MSI that i can't explain - large file transfer thru the USB 3.0 ports are the fastest i've seen, and rendering large video files have gone the fastest i've seen yet, by a large margin.
On my X99 Fatal1ty with a 5960X (8C/16T) a file that took 41 minutes to render, took 27 minutes on the Taichi mobo, with the 9900k at 4.9 OC. This afternoon, that same file on the MSI board took under 20 minutes, and the cpu is still at 4.7 OC.
Only real negative to the MSI, no HDMI or display port for the monitor so you have to have a dedicated GPU. For what i do or the programs i use, most rely on the cpu, so i was hoping to sell the GPU, and just use the 9900k's iGPU, but the speed i'm seeing, i'm not complaining. Leaving the X99/5960x i was a little worried as the 5960x has 40 PCI lanes and the 9900k only has 16, but it doesn't seem to have held back the work speed
back to, yeah, throw the coin at the Z390 - it'll give you some future proofing - i don't know about the Z370 chipset, but the Z390 is supposed to have 24 PCI lanes of it's own. I need to research that, so for what it's worth
You might take a look at the Asus ROG MAXIMUS XI HERO (WI-FI)
Both the MSI and the Asus have check points on the board so you can use a multi-meter to check voltage values - an interesting feature when you're wondering if the CPU is reporting correct voltages. Both also have mechanical acces to backup BIOS, which is a great feature - it would have been handy on the Asrock Taichi when i couldn't get past POST. The Gigabyte Aorus master has two switches to select main or backup BIOS or you can run them together - though it didn't help when my BIOS corrupted like a drunken martian.
I suspect the Asus is probably going to show the highest quatity, even though a lot of folks are screaming over their "four phase" VRM set up. But right now, you couldn't get this MSI board out of my hands.
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