MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium review - Introduction

MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium
Dressed to impress on your Ryzen PC desktop performance.

For our next X370 review we move on-wards to MSI with their grand X370 XPower Gaming Titanium. This top of the line Ryzen motherboard is stylish alright, wrapped in that Titanium look and feel the motherboard has a feature set that impresses, this motherboard might be a very nice match for your Ryzen series 5 or 7 processor. The X370 motherboard is seated in the high-end Ryzen motherboard spectrum. A breathtaking motherboard with that metal colored coating, extra overclock features, DDR4 A-XMP functions and not one two M.2. slots and just so much more. Titanium edition - it probably is the most interesting looking motherboard released ever thanks to that new PCB coating. 

AMD has released Ryzen 7, the product name ad series for their released 8-cores (16 threads) processors. A processor series fabbed at a more efficient and optimized 14 nanometer FinFET process, rather than the 32 nm and 28 nm processes of previous AMD FX CPUs and AMD APUs, respectively. AMD's processors and APUs over the years have run their course really, for the gamer and more mainstream PC aficionado the older FX and APU series simply lack in raw processor performance compared to what the competition has been offering. We discussed it many times in the reviews, but if you compared an Intel processor core and an AMD processor core and clocked them at the very same frequency, Intel was almost half faster. The effect of that phenomenon showed in the less optimized and threaded applications, many games are a good example here. Ryzen series 7 likely is best matched with B350 (a little more value) and the X370 motherboards as it is a high-end desktop (HEDT) product series.

Much like the competition AMD will be selling Ryzen in product stacks, low-end, mid-range and high-end much like Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 series. Earlier on referred to as SR7, SR5 and SR3, matching up with Summit Ridge (SR) and thus a performance segment denominator. But then Summit Ridge from the new Zen architecture was named Ryzen, and hence one more change in naming has now been made. You will see Ryzen series 3, 5 and 7 processors. The Ryzen series 7 processors are eight core processors at attractive pricing combined with an IPC increase of roughly 52%. They come with four integer units, two address generation units and four floating point units, the decoder can decode four instructions per clock cycle. L1 data cache size is 32 KiB and 64 KiB for instructions, the L2 cache size is a whopping 512 KiB per core. Two of the floating point units are adders, two are multipliers. One unit that holds four processors is a CCX (core complex). Ryzen 7 is an 8-core processor series and thus that means 2 CCXs x 8 MB (L3) + 8 x 512 KB (L2) = 20 MB in total for L2 and L3 caches. These numbers sound familiar, eh (Intel)? Today is obviously not just about the processors, au contraire Mon ami, you are going to need a new motherboard as well of course. A new processor series will need a new chipset as the motherboard needs an infrastructure as well. This has been outsourced and at launch you will see multiple product stacked motherboard chipsets. For Ryzen, you probably want a high-end / enthusiast class chipset with lots of features and tweaking options, this will be the X370 chipset that went along with the launch of the processor series release. X370 will give home to the new socket AM4 and will provide DDR4 memory support (as well as all other modern usual suspects like USB 3.1 gen 2, SATA Express, as well as NVMe protocol based M.2 support and surely PCI-Express Gen 3.0). For Socket AM4 following chipsets will be released: X370, B350, A320, X300 and A300.X370 is the more high-end series.

MSI is outing the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium, this is the top of the line (and bill at € 299,-) product in the X370 series from MSI. The XPOWER GAMING Titanium is a bit of a gem, all styled and tailored to be overclocked. This motherboard comes well equipped, dual M.2. slots, Gigabit Ethernet jack and a board that is based on 10 power phases for the Ryzen processor. The MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium edition motherboard is a mouth full of words for the name alone, but when you see it for the very first time, trust me you will be pleasantly surprised as it is a very feature rich product that will look terrific in any DIY PC build. The Titanium styled PCB comes with shielding and very subtle light accents. Features wise you may expect triple x16 PCI-Express slots, an 8-channel audio solution, the usual quality components and USB 3.1. Audio is based on Realtek 1220, but was enhanced and Audioboost software suite. The board supports two-way SLI and CrossFireX configs split between its main PCI Express x16 slots. The PCIe and DDR4 slots have been reinforced to withstand the weight of high-end cards. 

Overall we have lots to talk about, let’s start up the review, next page please.