MSI Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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MSI Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium Motherboard Review - MSI’s Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium is a feature packed powerhouse that’s got everything you need to take your game to the next level. The MSI Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium is easily one of the most robust solutions for overclocking. If you want a feature rich solution that can deliver the goods on the overclocking front, you’ll want to check this one out.
 
Am I the only one that thinks benchmarking a motherboard is a complete waste of time? As if a 0.3% difference will influence anything. Max o/c is important, but the same clock tests have always been silly to me.
 
Nihilus1 said:
Am I the only one that thinks benchmarking a motherboard is a complete waste of time? As if a 0.3% difference will influence anything. Max o/c is important, but the same clock tests have always been silly to me.
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You are certainly not the only one who understands that the motherboard benchmarks are a complete waste of time and provide very little in the way of useful information to the consumer. Kyle and I have both said the benchmarks hold no real value when comparing motherboard performance. Everything that determines the performance of the system is tied up in other components such as the CPU. Years ago when cache was on the motherboard or there were a lot of different chipsets out there, it mattered quite a lot. Benchmarks are one of those legacy items from days past when motherboard performance was all over the map. Still, benchmarks are expected, even demanded. That's one of the biggest reasons we still do them. If we dropped the benchmark data, I'm sure we'd get a tsunami of hate mail and comments from people bitching that we didn't do them.

That said, they do serve one purpose above all else and that's to make sure that the system is working / performing correctly, and that there aren't any performance oddities with the motherboard in question. We actually saw some of that with the Z170 motherboards as ASUS kicked the shit out of everyone else in the benchmarks. We had to dig deep to figure that out and really never did. The fclock setting was part of it, but there was something in the ASUS firmware that caused them to do that. It didn't seem to matter all that much in the real world, but it was something worth noting and I'm sure some people appreciated that information. It's just more information to help people make an informed decision about what motherboard to buy.
 
Well,
at the end of the day it is outperformed by a "cheap" Asus Prime-A Z270. Mine does 3600XMP solid..@ 1.3992V vDimm and 1.330vCore. all that for 159€

Never again MSI, had 1 ...and I was soooo disappointed by it's oc capability and stability that I went straight back to where I came from, Asus.
 
BitMaster said:
Well,
at the end of the day it is outperformed by a "cheap" Asus Prime-A Z270. Mine does 3600XMP solid..@ 1.3992V vDimm and 1.330vCore. all that for 159€

Never again MSI, had 1 ...and I was soooo disappointed by it's oc capability and stability that I went straight back to where I came from, Asus.
Click to expand...


All manufacturers have had their foibles at one time or another. For instance, it seems that ASUS has handled the Ryzen release worse than most with virtually non-existent BIOS updates and the like while it seems to me that MSI has handled it as well as any of the the best. The only complaint I have with MSI in that regard is that they don't have but two extremely different X370 enthusiast offerings. It's either the mid-range Carbon or the very high end Titanium and nothing in between.
 
craigdt said:
Looking at this and other boards for this very thing, and it appears that Optane is universally mocked here. Care to key me in?
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Right now, Optane is used for SSD caching which isn't anything new. We saw that with IRST on the Z68 platform. It wasn't anything to write home about then and it's less useful now when SSD's are relatively cheap.
 
craigdt said:
Care to elaborate on the z270 dying platform thing?
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Intel's new mainstream platform will be releasing shortly, and that is likely to offer six cores... using a new socket of course. Moreover, if you do content creation to any real degree rather than pure gaming, then for the same money you can have a Ryzen R1700 from AMD which will outclass Z270 from a productivity standpoint.

craigdt said:
Looking at this and other boards for this very thing, and it appears that Optane is universally mocked here. Care to key me in?
Click to expand...

Dan_D said:
Right now, Optane is used for SSD caching which isn't anything new. We saw that with IRST on the Z68 platform. It wasn't anything to write home about then and it's less useful now when SSD's are relatively cheap.
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Not only is it just a mini SSD cache, Optane is appearing on boards where the user is almost certain to already have at least one SSD, possibly more, possibly even in RAID 0, and those SSDs might PCIe using .m2 drives. A person can now buy a full on, small 30-80GB, for about the same money as an Optane accelerator. Optane is badly over-priced and outclassed in its present form and for the boards offering it.
 
craigdt said:
Care to elaborate on the z270 dying platform thing?
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Z270 is going to find itself supplanted shortly. Intel's new LGA 2066 offerings scale between 4 cores upwards of 10 cores to start, with up to 18 planned in the near future. Kaby Lake-X CPUs are supposed to have 16 PCIe lanes, and will be limited to 4 DIMMs which is the same as the LGA 1151 CPUs. Supposedly, the motherboard manufacturers are going to release cut down X299 motherboards that are closer to Z270 motherboards regarding their feature set and price points. Thus, there will be no reason to buy LGA 1151 / Z270 motherboards going forward. LGA 2066 will make more sense for anyone building a new system and it will provide a stronger upgrade path for either CPU's in the lower end motherboards or higher end motherboards with lower end CPUs.

AMD's X370 and Ryzen CPU lineup is also very feature / price competitive with Z270 and as a result, Z270 isn't much of a contender.
 
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So far I have used 2 MSI motherboards, 1 Z97 in my dad's pc runs fine without issues, I had an Z170 Gaming M5 which required a few bios updates to run smoothly (b4 bios update my RAM would not work properly, then again I was an early adopter of Skylake so kinks are to be expected).

IMO bios is no better or worse then Asus or Asrock (other then beeing ugly) I have no experience with Gigabyte.
 
Nihilus1 said:
Am I the only one that thinks benchmarking a motherboard is a complete waste of time? As if a 0.3% difference will influence anything. Max o/c is important, but the same clock tests have always been silly to me.
Click to expand...

Nope. We've said as much several times. It's something that's "expected". There is one benefit to it and that's making sure the system is stable and that everything works as it should, but for comparison purposes it's not something you should look at beyond seeing if there are abnormalities.
 
Denpepe said:
So far I have used 2 MSI motherboards, 1 Z97 in my dad's pc runs fine without issues, I had an Z170 Gaming M5 which required a few bios updates to run smoothly (b4 bios update my RAM would not work properly, then again I was an early adopter of Skylake so kinks are to be expected).

IMO bios is no better or worse then Asus or Asrock (other then beeing ugly) I have no experience with Gigabyte.
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the 1 yr. warranty at MSI and ASRock scares me. It could be just a marketing thing. But I am much more comfortable w/ 3 yr. warranty motherboard. That way, I don't have to worry about anything
 
Happy Hopping said:
the 1 yr. warranty at MSI and ASRock scares me. It could be just a marketing thing. But I am much more comfortable w/ 3 yr. warranty motherboard. That way, I don't have to worry about anything
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You sure you looked at the right page? You link the laptop warranty page, the motherboard tab states 36 months for motherboards (depending on region)
 
You're right. When it says "
.motherboard, CPU memory,LCD, HDD In accordance with original manufacturer's products serial number/barcode, it is warranted for 12 months repair service from its manufacture date.
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I thought they are saying their motherboard id 12 mth., I didn't see the top corner where it says laptop on it.

My screen is too big, it's a 40" UHD. :ROFLMAO:

Thanks for pointing it out. So MSI is in fact 3 yr.

However, ASrock is still 1 yr. on everything

https://www.asrock.com/support/index.us.asp?cat=RMA
 
I finished off reading the manual and spec., I have a few quick questions:

1) does the BIOS support legacy mode? in other words, I want to set up the m.2 SATA SSD in Legacy mode


2) is the RGB LED slot for 12 V only? So I should buy the 12V LED strip only?

3) In the Z370 Godlike gaming board, they give you a free m.2 Xpander card, is that card compatible with this motherboard?
 
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