MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium AM4 Socket motherboard is available from today for £299.99, which is a lot of money, but it’s on par with their Z270 XPOWER Gaming Titanium in terms of features, and it’s actually just a little bit cheaper too! I’d love to say this is great value for money, that’s really a subjective matter right now until we have more motherboards tested at various price ranges. For now, this is an expensive board, but you do get a lot of features in return for your investment.

Overview

MSI is well-known for creating high-end, high-performance motherboards for the enthusiast and prosumer markets, and the X370 is no exception. AMD has a lot to offer with their new Ryzen chips, and the X370 ticks every single box for what the new processors can do, as well as offering up a lot of future-proof features that AMD users have come to expect. The board supports the new Ryzen processors, but will also offer up support for the next-generation of AM4 APUs, which explains why this board has HDMI and DisplayPort connections, despite Ryzen not having an iGPU.

The board has been designed for those building high-end gaming systems, and it certainly delivers on that front, giving us some of the best scores we’ve ever tested overall and for and AMD platform. It’s clear that this board can let our graphics card reach its full potential and we’re certain that will only get better as BIOS and general chipset drivers mature.

There are a few quirks with Ryzen and the chipset at the moment, with some fairly high latency on memory, and the A-XMP profiles are pretty buggy too, but we’ve heard similar reports from within the industry, and once people become more familiar with the way the new chipset behaves, we expect to see these problems ironed out fairly quickly.

The design of the motherboard is obviously subjective, but I think it’s one of the best looking boards on the market today. The Titanium finish certainly stands out from the crowd and is sure to appeal to those who like a fairly flashy looking gaming system, while the inclusion of LED lighting features are sure to please those who like a little extra light in their life. The Armor features do improve the overall durability of the motherboard, such as the reinforced memory and PCIe slots, but they also add to the overall aesthetics too.

General performance is rock solid on this board, memory performance issues aside for now, with very good audio performance in all our tests, competitive M.2 speeds compared to Intel offerings, DDR4 support on an AMD platform at long last, super-fast network performance, the list goes on. While this motherboard isn’t cheap, it’s offset a fair bit by the competitively priced Ryzen processors, making it a strong contender for those looking to build a high-performance 8-core gaming rig with a focus on overclocking.

Pros

• Stunning aesthetics
• Excellent M.2 performance
• Impressive network speeds
• Easy to overclock from BIOS or using Game Boost controls
• Very good audio performance
• Durable build quality with Armor and Titanium design
• Lightning USB 3.1 Gen 2, Turbo M.2, Turbo U.2
• LED lighting
• Extra 6-pin PCIe power delivery
• Ready for next-gen AM4 APUs
• Enables overclocking on all Ryzen CPUs
• On-board debug light with built-in temperature readout

Cons

• High memory latency
• A-XMP still buggy

“The MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium motherboard is a great pairing for the flagship X1800 Ryzen CPU from AMD, offering fantastic performance for gamers, easy to use overclocking and class-leading build quality.”