MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium AM4 Motherboard Review

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Feature Testing: Mystic Light

Feature Testing: Mystic Light

In the introduction, we mentioned that that the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium has a rather unique LED lighting feature since it doesn't use RGB LEDs, just white ones. This is a bold choice given what while yes, white lighting does look when great paired with this motherboard, giving users the choice to select their preferred colour would have been the better option. As implemented, the lighting zones cannot be independently and there are also only five animation effects. The lack of effects is partly due to the lack of RGB LEDs, since you can't exactly pull off a rainbow effect with only white lightning.

While the white lighting looks great on this model, the aesthetic is disturbed by a number of other LEDs. You see the power and reset buttons have green lightning, the Debug LED display and a half dozen other diagnostic LEDs are of the red-only variety, and the two LEDs that indicate whether the CPU fans headers are in PWM or DC modes are either red or green. What this means that is that no matter what, you cannot really achieve a uniform colour pattern on this motherboard.

Thankfully, if you so choose, you can disable all of the white LEDs and instead use your own lighting since the onboard RGB LED header will allow you to plug in two 5050 RGB LED light strips and have them fully powered by the motherboard. You can simply attach the light strips to the included extension cable, and attach that cable to the header. This approach not only saves you money, and reduces clutter inside your system, but also gives you full control over the strips from inside the LED application.

Let's take a peek at the LED utility again:

The LED utility is obviously the piece of software in charge of controlling the Mystic Light LED lighting feature. Whether you like LED lighting or not, you will need to install this piece of software (which is integrated into the Gaming App) since there is basically no LED settings in the UEFI. If you want to disable this feature, it is as simple as clicking the icon in the top-right corner.

Using the LED utility you can customize the lighting with your choice of five lighting effects, such as breathing, flashing, double flashing, random, or you can enable the extended effects and it can react to your music or your CPU temperature. You can also choose to disable all effects, and just display a static colour. The Extend LED Effects area reveals small number of colours and additional effects that, but they don't actually apply to this particular motherboard, at least not in stock form. We suspect that they might only work when you install a LED light strip.

Click on image to enlarge​

As you can clearly see, the overall lightning effect is not exactly brilliant or blinding since the LEDs are largely relegated to the right side of the motherboard. Some LEDs near the rear I/O area and perhaps next to the PCI-E slots would have gone a long way towards to improving the overall lighting effect. This pales in comparison to what MSI managed on their much cheaper Z270 Gaming M7, so colour us disappointed.

While there might be more LED lighting on this motherboard than on the ASRock X370 Taichi, it still pales in comparison to the GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5. As they demonstrated with the aforementioned MSI Z270 Gaming M7, they are capable of doing so much better than they have with the X370 XPower, and we don't understand why they held back on such an expensive motherboard.

 

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Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Since fewer and fewer consumers seem to be buying discrete sound cards, the quality of a motherboard's onboard audio is now more important than ever. As such, we figured that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at just how good the analog signal quality is coming out of the onboard Audio Boost 4 audio subsystem that is implemented on the X370 XPower. As mentioned earlier, this model features the new Realtek ALC1220 codec, Texas Instruments OP1652 op-amp, Nippon Chemi-Con audio capacitors, and a PCB-level isolation line.

Since isolated results don't really mean much, but we have also included some numbers from the plethora of motherboards that we have previously reviewed. All of the Z170 models feature onboard audio solutions that are built around the Realtek ALC1150 codec, while the X370 and Z270 motherboards all feature the newer Realtek ALC1220 codec. While they may all have similar codecs, there are vastly different hardware implementations that feature different op-amps, headphone amplifiers, filtering capacitors, secondary components and layouts.

We are going to do this using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, since sound quality isn't really something that can be adequately explained with only numbers. To do the quantitative portion, we have turned to RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA), which the standard application for this type of testing.

Since all modern motherboards support very high quality 24-bit, 192kHz audio playback we selected that as the sample mode option. Basically, what this test does is pipe the audio signal from the front-channel output to the line-in input via a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male mini-plug cable, and then RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA) does the audio analysis. Obviously we disabled all software enhancements since they interfere with the pure technical performance that we are trying to benchmark.

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Although the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium's audio results are a little bit behind those of the GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5 and ASRock X370 Taichi in the two noise categories, the differences are minimal, and everything else looks fantastic. As we have mentioned in the past, we aren't experts when it comes to sound quality, but at this high level we suspect that just about anyone should be satisfied. We listened to a variety of music and spoken word content using a mix of Grado SR225i and Koss PortaPro headphones, Westone UM1 IEMs, and Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speakers, and the playback was clean and loud. Frankly, we have no criticisms whatsoever. We suspect that your average user will be perfectly satisfied with this motherboard's onboard audio capabilities.

 

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Feature Testing: M.2 x4 - PCI-E 3.0 vs. PCI-E 2.0

Feature Testing: M.2 x4 - PCI-E 3.0 vs. PCI-E 2.0

One of the more disappointing aspects of this new Ryzen + X370 combo is the limited amount of PCI-E lanes. While the processors themselves have a respectable 24 PCI-E 3.0 lanes - compared to 20 total on Kaby Lake - the AMD X370 chipset itself only has eight PCI-E 2.0 lanes. By comparison, the Intel Z270 PCH has an incredible 24 PCI-E 3.0 lanes, and thus almost 6 times the bandwidth capabilities. This disparity makes itself apparent when divvying up the lanes for high-speed storage.

Now what is interesting is that unlike Intel which leans heavily on its chipset for all storage connectivity, AMD made the decision to allocate four of those CPU-based PCI-E 3.0 lanes for storage purposes, which means that the chipset lanes go untouched. However, since the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium motherboard comes with two M.2 slots, we have now encountered a unique situation whereby the primary slot that gets four PCI-E 3.0 lanes from the processor is obviously much faster than the secondary slot which runs off the chipset at PCI-E 2.0 x4. The difference between PCI-E 3.0 x4 and PCI-E x2.0 is technically 4GB/s versus 2GB/s, but the real-life numbers are roughly 3.5GB/s versus 1.6GB/s. This latter figure will obviously bottleneck most of the higher-end NVMe SSDs currently available, for example the Samsung SSD 950 PRO 256GB.

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Despite now being usurped by the SSD 960 PRO, this high performance NVMe PCI-E SSD combines Samsung's awesome UBX controller with its industry-leading 3D V-NAND and is capable of sequential read speeds of up to 2,200MB/second and write speeds of up to 900MB/sec.

One of the ways that we will be evaluating the performance of a motherboard's M.2 interface is by verifying that is capable of matching or exceeding these listed transfer rates. The other is by checking to see whether those slots performs as well as a ASUS Hyper M.2 x4 expansion card plugged directly into a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot and a PCI-E 2.0 slot. As mentioned above, on this platform the PCI-E lanes that the M.2 slots require come from either the processor or the chipset, and we are interested to see what the performance difference is and whether the lane splitting has been well implemented.

Without further ado, here are the results:

Top Row: M.2 x4 3.0 slot vs. PCI-E x4 3.0 card, Bottom Row: M.2 x4 2.0 slot vs. PCI-E x4 2.0 card​

As can see, both of the M.2 slots performed on-par with the M.2 adapter in the PCI-E slots. Obviously, this is a sign that both of the M.2 slots have been properly implemented. As we mentioned above, it is clear that the PCI-E 2.0 x4 interface is a bottleneck for our Samsung 950 PRO and any other higher-performing NVMe solid state drive. What is also interesting is the fact that in PCI-E 2.0 mode, the SSD achieved notably higher write performance than we have ever seen before from this drive in PCI-E 3.0 mode. Perhaps, given the diminished read speed, the controller is able to allocate more resources towards write performance.

While transfer rates are obviously an important metric, we figured that it was also worthwhile to take a peak at instructions per second (IOPS) to ensure that there wasn't any variance there either:

Top Row: M.2 x4 3.0 vs. PCI-E x4 3.0, Bottom Row: M.2 x4 2.0 vs. PCI-E x4 2.0​

Once again, the differences are essentially non-existent and well within the margin of error for this benchmark. As a result, it is clear that the M.2 interfaces on the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium has been very well implemented. The primary M.2 slot should be able to get optimal performance from any current or future M.2 x4 solid state drive, while the secondary M.2 slot still offers ample performance for a larger PCI-E or SATA drive that might be used for applications or games.

 

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Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

Unlike the ASRock X370 Taichi, which had no automatic overclocking feature at the time we reviewed it, the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium does come with this feature. As you will see below, it's actually pretty good, and would be even better if there was more frequency headroom on these eight-core Ryzen processors. Overall, squeezing that little bit of extra performance is exceptionally easy even for a novice overclocker. Simply set the CPU voltage to 1.35V-1.40V and start increasing the CPU multiplier until it crashes in your preferred stress test, then back off a little bit. Next is the memory speed, if you have a good memory kit that are rated at/under DDR4-3200, you can probably just try to enable the XMP or A-XMP profile. If XMP doesn't work, set the SOC voltage to between 1.05V and 1.20V and the memory voltage to 1.35V. If you aren't familiar with your RAM's capabilities, you might as well start off with loose 19-19-19-19-39 timings, and start manually increasing the memory speed from DDR4-2400 to DDR4-3200. Once you have found your the highest memory speed, it's time to start tightening the timings. A simple HyperPI 32M run on all available threads should be sufficient to give you a good indication of whether that memory configuration is stable or not.

With all that out of the way, let's see what we were able to hit.

Auto Overclocking

Click on image to enlarge​

As we mentioned in the introduction, this motherboard has one of the cooler automatic overclocking features that we have encountered. The Game Boost Knob is a large rotating knob/clickable button that is found in the lower right-hand corner of the motherboard. It allows users a means of (literally) manually overclocking their system with the ease of automatic presets. The knob has different eight positions, starting from zero (which means off) to the mythical 11. These presets can overclock a Ryzen 7 1800X from a mere 4.10Ghz all the way up to 4.40GHz. There is still no automatic memory overclock, but that's probably a safe choice given the still precarious state of memory overclocking on the AM4 platform.

If the motherboard is already installed in your case, you don't have to bother manually toying with the knob. In the top left corner of the UEFI, there is an option to switch between hardware and software mode, and you can just select the desired overclocking preset with your mouse.

If you are not comfortable entering the BIOS, MSI have a Windows-based software solution for you as well:

Click on image to enlarge​

In the Command Center app, there is a Game Boost tab that gives you full access to the eight Game Boost presets. It also lists what overclock you can expect at each level, which is obviously incredibly handy. Once you have chosen your desired preset, a simple reboot locks in the overclock. The whole process takes only few seconds. It is very well implemented and we like the fact that there are actually levels, unlike the single preset approach on the MSI B350 Tomahawk.

Let's see the results:

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Despite being advertised as 4.1Ghz, Game Boost Level 1 actually overclocked our particular chip to 4.0GHz at core voltages ranging from 1.456V for single-threaded workloads to 1.464V while multi-threading. Game Boost Level 2 pushed our chip to 4.15GHz at 1.500V, and while it was successful that is too much voltage for our liking, so we switched back to Level 1.

As mentioned above, the memory speed was left untouched, but that is to be expected until the memory overclocking and compatibility situation improves significantly.

Manual Overclocking

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Given that we spent a lot of time with this motherboard, we were able to squeeze 4.125Ghz from our Ryzen 7 1800X at 1.41V. This is about 25Mhz more than our usual 4.10Ghz overclock, although with a tiny bit (0.05V) more Vcore as well.

In order to achieve this overclock we obviously needed to tweak the other system voltages a bit too, and we set the SOC voltage to 1.20V and the RAM voltage to 1.35V. The SOC voltage relates to the system-on-chip (SoC), which is to say the part of the processor that features the memory controller, PCI-E controller, and on-die storage connectivity. While the SOC voltage usually defaults to around 0.85-0.86V, we needed to increase that to 1.20V in order to run at DDR4-3200 with full stability. While that is quite the increase, we have been told that is safe for 24/7 use...though you shouldn't go any higher.

The memory kit that we used was half of a 4x8GB G.Skill Trident Z F4-3200C14Q-32GTZSW kit, which features a DDR4-3200 XMP profile with 14-14-14-34 timings. The X370 XPower has an option to enable XMP profiles, and it had no problems setting the appropriate memory frequency, timings, and voltages to run our memory at its full DDR4-3200 potential.

Overall, the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium proved to be every bit as good as the ASRock X370 Taichi and GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5 when it comes to overclocking. Given that we are dealing with largely self-imposed overclocking limits of ~4.1Ghz/~1.40-1.41V in order to manage heat output, the only way a motherboard could disappointment us is by not reaching this level. Once the AGESA 1.0.0.6 comes out and we can start really pushing the memory clocks, then motherboards might start distinguishing themselves a little more.

 

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System Benchmarks

System Benchmarks

In the System and Gaming Benchmarks sections, we reveal the results from a number of benchmarks run with a Ryzen 7 1800X and MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium at default clocks (with the three different memory speeds) and using own our manual overclock. This will illustrate how much performance can be achieved with this motherboard in stock and overclocked form. For a thorough comparison of the Ryzen 7 1800X versus a number of different CPUs have a look at our "AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Performance Review" article.

SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. We are running one instance of SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP. This is therefore a single-thread workload.

wPRIME 2.10

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. This is a highly multi-threaded workload.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench R15 64-bit
Test1: CPU Image Render
Comparison: Generated Score

The latest benchmark from MAXON, Cinebench R15 makes use of all your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene using various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. This particular benchmarking can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

WinRAR x64

WinRAR x64 5.40
Test: Built-in benchmark, processing 1000MB of data.
Comparison: Time to Finish

One of the most popular file archival and compression utilities, WinRAR's built-in benchmark is a great way of measuring a processor's compression and decompression performance. Since it is a memory bandwidth intensive workload it is also useful in evaluating the efficiency of a system's memory subsystem.

FAHBench

FAHBench 1.2.0
Test: OpenCL on CPU
Comparison: Generated Score

FAHBench is the official Folding@home benchmark that measures the compute performance of CPUs and GPUs. It can test both OpenCL and CUDA code, using either single or double precision, and implicit or explicit modeling. The single precision implicit model most closely relates to current folding performance.

HEVC Decode Benchmark v1.61

HEVC Decode Benchmark (Cobra) v1.61
Test: Frame rates at various resolution, focusing on the top quality 25Mbps bitrate results.
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

The HEVC Decode Benchmark measures a system's HEVC video decoding performance at various bitrates and resolutions. HEVC, also known as H.265, is the successor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) standard and it is very computationally intensive if not hardware accelerated. This decode test is done entirely on the CPU.

LuxMark v3.1

Test: OpenCL CPU Mode benchmark of the LuxBall HDR scene.
Comparison: Generated Score

LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmarking tool that utilizes the LuxRender 3D rendering engine. Since it OpenCL based, this benchmark can be used to test OpenCL rendering performance on both CPUs and GPUs, and it can put a significant load on the system due to its highly parallelized code.

PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is the latest iteration of Futuremark’s system benchmark franchise. It generates an overall score based upon system performance with all components being stressed in one way or another. The result is posted as a generalized score. In this case, we tested with both the standard Conventional benchmark and the Accelerated benchmark, which automatically chooses the optimal device on which to perform OpenCL acceleration.

AIDA64 Memory Benchmark

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a diagnostic and benchmarking software suite for home users that provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives.

The benchmarks used in this review are the memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks. Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.

 

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Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark v1.1.0
Graphic Settings: Fire Strike Preset
Rendered Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark is the brand new cross-platform benchmark from the gurus over at Futuremark. Designed to test a full range of hardware from smartphones to high-end PCs, it includes three tests for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 hardware, and allows users to compare 3DMark scores with other Windows, Android and iOS devices. Most important to us is the new Fire Strike preset, a DirectX 11 showcase that tests tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Like every new 3DMark version, this test is extremely GPU-bound, but it does contain a heavy physics test that can show off the potential of modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

3DMark 11 v1.0.5
Graphic Settings: Extreme Preset
Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark 11 is Futuremark's very latest benchmark, designed to tests all of the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. At the moment, it is lot more GPU-bound than past versions are now, but it does contain a terrific physics test which really taxes modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage v1.1.2
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x1024

Test: Specific CPU Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score

3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses DirectX 10 exclusively so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about this benchmark. Along with being a very capable graphics card testing application, it also has very heavily multi-threaded CPU tests, such Physics Simulation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes it a good all-around gaming benchmark.

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark
Resolution: 1920x1080
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Graphic Settings: High

Comparison: Particle Performance Metric

Originally intended to demonstrate new processing effects added to Half Life 2: Episode 2 and future projects, the particle benchmark condenses what can be found throughout HL2:EP2 and combines it all into one small but deadly package. This test does not symbolize the performance scale for just Episode Two exclusively, but also for many other games and applications that utilize multi-core processing and particle effects. This benchmark might be a little old, but is still very highly-threaded and thus will keep scaling nicely as processors gain more and more threads. As you will see the benchmark does not score in FPS but rather in its own "Particle Performance Metric", which is useful for direct CPU comparisons.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict 1.2.0.0
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: High
Antialiasing 4X
Anisotropic Mode: 8X
Glow Enabled

Game Benchmark
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC) is the culmination of the X-series of space trading and combat simulator computer games from German developer Egosoft. With its vast space worlds, intricately detailed ships, and excellent effects, it remains a great test of modern CPU performance. While the X3 Reality engine is single-threaded, it provides us with an interesting look at performance in an old school game environment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Benchmark

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: Maximum IQ
DirectX 11
Fullscreen

Game Benchmark
Comparison: Generated Score

Square Enix released this benchmarking tool to rate how your system will perform in Heavensward, the expansion to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. This official benchmark software uses actual maps and playable characters to benchmark gaming performance and assign a score to your PC.

Grand Theft Auto V

DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Resolution: 1920x1080
FXAA: On
MSAA: X4
NVIDIA TXAA: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: X16
All advanced graphics settings off.

In GTA V, we utilize the handy in-game benchmarking tool. We do ten full runs of the benchmark and average the results of pass 3 since they are the least erratic. We do additional runs if some of the results are clearly anomalous. The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) is ostensibly multi-threaded, but it definitely places the bulk of the CPU load on only one or two threads.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Resolution: 1920x1080
Graphical Quality: Custom
Mesh/Shadow/Texture Filtering/Vegetation Range: Ultra
Lighting/Texture Quality/Ambient Occlusion: High
Depth of Field/Order Independent Transparency/Tesselation: Enabled

With its high resolution textures and several other visual tweaks, Shadow of Mordor’s open world is also one of the most detailed around. This means it puts massive load on graphics cards and should help point towards which GPUs will excel at next generation titles. We do three full runs of the benchmark and average the results.

 

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Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Voltage Regulation

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Since this is a high-end model with serious overclocking aspirations, the X370 XPower has a few onboard voltage measurement points. Our voltage regulation testing will focus on those various system voltages and the differences encountered between what is selected in the BIOS and what is measured by a digital multi-meter (DMM). Thanks to the six onboard voltage measurement points we didn't have to go poking & prodding everywhere, since all the voltage read points are located in one convenient spot.

These measurements were taken at stock system speeds and with all settings set to default in the BIOS. We used Prime 95 Blend in order to create a heavy system load. Here are our findings:

Overall, the voltages were dead-on, what was set in the BIOS was exactly what was measured at the voltage read points. The CPU core voltage did tend to spike under multi-threaded workloads, but that's not usual for this platform.

We also decided to take a close look at the stability of the all-important CPU Vcore line. This was achieved with a 90 minute run of the AIDA64 System Stability Test, which puts a very substantial load on the system. In order to further increase the strain on the motherboard's voltage regulation components we overclocked our Ryzen 7 1800X to 3.9Ghz with the CPU voltage as close as possible to 1.35V. We utilized the Load-Line Calibration (LLC) settings in order to see if this motherboard is able to maintain a rock steady vCore line.

Click on image to enlarge​

Although the above only represents an approximately 15 minute portion of the 90 minute test, it adequately represents how the CPU voltage line acted throughout the stress test. The Vcore overwhelmingly stayed at 1.344V with the occasional spike up to 1.352V. By the way, all that we needed to do in order to get a load Vcore that was as close to 1.35V as possible for this test all that we had to do was set the Vcore to 1.350V in the UEFI and set Load-Line Calibration (LLC) to Mode .


Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the BIOS and the Windows power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter. For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter. For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 on all available threads while simultaneously loading the GPU with 3DMark Vantage - Test 6 Perlin Noise.

When compared to the ASRock X370 Taichi and the GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5, the X370 XPower's power consumption results are all roughly in the same ballpark, especially when it comes to default settings. The DDR4-3200 results cannot really be directly compared because as motherboard manufacturers get more and more hands-on time with this platform, they have been able to released BIOSes that reduce the voltages need to hit certain frequencies. The manual overclock consumption numbers between the MSI and the GIGABYTE are comparable as well, with the ASRock posting a fair bit higher results (but again, on a very early BIOS back then). Overall, we like what we're seeing here, but maybe with better components the results could have been even better.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

In our conclusion for the GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5, we mentioned that it was no surprise that we liked this new AM4 motherboard since it was largely a clone of the AORUS Z270X-Gaming 5, which had received our Dam Good Award. One of our quotes was "there is no reason to start from scratch when you have a great base upon which to build and improve".

Regrettably, we wish MSI had done the same, since by all accounts the Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium is a tremendous motherboard. While the X370 XPower and the Z270 XPower might look identical, the differences are vast. The Intel model has distinctly superior VRM components, a greater number of overclocking features, some truly unique and useful accessories. The Z270 XPower might have been pricey, but it was easy to see where the money was going, whether you cared about the features or not. Regrettably, that is simply not the case with the X370 XPower.

At $300 USD / $400 CAD, MSI's flagship is $50 USD more than the second most expensive ASUS Crosshair IV Hero, and it is about $100 USD more than either the ASRock X370 Taichi or the GIGABYTE AX370-Gaming 5. All three of those models have better CPU power designs than the MSI X370 XPower, while the GIGABYTE has a better LED lighting feature, and the ASRock has arguably better overall connectivity. All four models are effectively identical in the onboard audio and manual overclocking departments. So why is there such a price premium?

This flagship motherboard uses the exact same type of MOSFETS that MSI are using on their $80 B350M Gaming Pro, that doesn't exactly scream "premium components" to us. While MSI has opted for an excellent Infineon PWM controller, you can find the same one on both the ASRock and GIGABYTE boards. So clearly that's not where the money was spent either.

There are some bright spots though. For example, the X370 XPower has great USB 3.1 Gen2 connectivity thanks to the addition of an ASMmedia ASM2142 controller, so there are not only two high-speed ports on the rear I/O but also a USB Type-C front panel header that can add two more ports to the front. When it comes to unique features, the four voltage read points, slow mode jumper, and two extra power connectors are interesting additions for a small segment of the population. The physical Game Boost Knob is a fun feature that makes automatic overclocking totally idiot-proof, and we like the fact that the Game Boost feature is accessible not only via this knob, but via the UEFI and Windows-based software. The HDMI 2.0 video output is cool in theory, but as we mentioned in the review, who is going to install an APU on a motherboard this expensive? It seems a little absurd to us.

Overall, we don't love the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium, but that's largely because we see what it could have and should have been. Though we dig the cool metallic-looking PCB, we don't see anything new or worthwhile that justifies its extravagant price tag. The few interesting add-ons don't overshadow the fact that one of the most expensive AM4 motherboard on the market is merely as good as the competition in most respects.