MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

This motherboard certainly stands out from the crowd! The Titanium finish does look pretty cool, with a metallic off-white finish that shines as the light hits it. The board design is pretty clean overall, not too much clutter and your eyes are naturally more drawn towards the shroud/cooler design, as well as the MSI dragon and logo.

Connectivity comes with no compromise on this board, with six SATA 6Gbps ports on the right edge, as well as a 90-degree rotated USB 3.0 header, which should aid with cable routing in your new build. If that’s not enough ports for your, you’ll also find a Turbo U.2 port, and support for Lightning USB 3.1 Gen2, ensuring you get the absolute best performance for connected devices.

Overclockers rejoice, as you’ll find power and overclocking controls right on the motherboard. The red button is fun, it’s a built-in overclocking mode and can be set anywhere from 0 (off) to 11 (very extreme O.C.) just by turning the dial then hitting the red button; just make sure you have a powerful CPU cooler before you dial it too high!

Further up the board, you’ll find the 24-pin power connector, a few of the 4-pin PWM fan headers (there are six in total!), the debug LEDs, and those lovely DDR4 slots which come with Armor, adding durability, but also looks pretty cool too.

The debug LED is a great feature to have, and as a nice bonus, this one will show you system CPU temperatures after the system has been booted.

Along the bottom edge, you’ll find the usual headers for USB and HD Audio, as well as an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector, which is ideal for pushing more power to the PCIe slots when using multiple graphics cards and can help you maintain higher overclocks.

There are three full-size PCIe slots on this board, with the top two featuring Armor, ensuring a durable and reliable fit even for the heaviest cards on the market. If you’re loving the Armor additions, there’s also an M.2 shield tucked away here too.

This board promises high-end audio with Audio Boost 4 and Nahimic 2. There is a break in the PCB separating the audio hardware from the main board, with a small bit of the rear I/O cover branching out and providing a shield for the caps and other audio components.

The VRM cooler is huge, with a thick heat pipe running through both sections and it looks even bigger when you factor in the rear I/O shroud. Overall, it does look very well and despite the size of the cooling hardware, there’s a huge amount of space around the CPU socket, so cooler compatibility should be very good overall.

The I/O shield keeps the back of the board looking neat and tidy, hiding a lot of the blocked port connectors from view once installed in your system; a simple yet effective way to smarten up the aesthetics.

The I/O is well equipped with all the usual ports, although a few things are worth pointing out. There’s a small button near the top, you can use this to reset the BIOS should you muck up an overclock or any other setting for that matter.

Around the back, you can see the same colour scheme continues throughout.

There we have it, a great looking board and a lot of interesting features, but let’s get the Ryzen 1800X plugged in and see what this board can do!