MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium review - The Guru3D review

MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium edition motherboard
Like bond - dressed to kill

We review one of the most talked about motherboards when it comes to design, the MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium edition. It probably is the most interesting looking motherboard released ever thanks to a new PCB coating. Combined with a few extra's and an overall high class build MSI might have a true winner here. A motherboard that promises to deliver a high amount of features and provide that Skylake processor the full infrastructure is needs for a kick-ass gaming PC. Dressed to kill and with added benefits like USB 3.1, multiple M.2. slots and the fastest DDR4 support the product will shock and awe. These motherboards can (well must) be paired with new Skylake-S series processors. We'll quickly dive into the two most import ones. Skylake Core i5-6600K and Core i7 6700K processors for the desktop platform have been released. We test both processors, yet have separate reviews on each of these processors. A new chip, a new package meaning both of them are Socket 1151. The new series Skylake processors are energy efficient, quite powerful and this need to be paired with a new motherboards series. For you guys that means the Z170 and h170 range. In this review we test the Core i5 6600K. An unlocked Skylake processor that has four cores and slim a 92W TDP,that is lower compared to Haswell with its 95W TDP, thanks to the new and smaller 14nm fabrication process. The quad core CPU has 8 MB L3 cache, and an integrated memory controller that supports both DDR4 and DDR3 memory. The Z170 and H170 series motherboards will all be offered with DDR4 though. For the gaming community two processors are the most important. The Core i7 6700K has Four CPU cores with Hyper-Threading, 4.0GHz frequency, 4.20GHz maximum Turbo Boost frequency. Then there is the Core i5 6600K with four cores, 3.50GHz frequency and a 3.90GHz maximum Turbo Boost frequency, both based on the new LGA1151 socket package. Skylake is the code-name used by Intel for the 14nm processor micro-architecture under development and is the successor to the Broadwell architecture. 

So then, the MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium edition motherboard, it certainly is a mouth full of words, but when you see it for the very first time, trust me you will be pleasantly surprized as it is a very feature rich product that will look terrific in any DIY PC build thanks to the new Titanium color PCB coating. PCB coating is a fairly new technology and a trend which you will see in the upcoming years on many products. 

The motherboard features, performance and aesthetics matter to you then the MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium edition might just be what the doctor ordered for you. A Titanium colored PCB with shielding and light accents. Features wise you may expect quadruple PCI-Express 3.0 ports, 8-channel Audio Boost 3 audio solution, the usual quality components and a Gigabit/s Ethernet jack. Then you will spot USB 3.1, not one but M.2. slots. meaning if you put two M.2. SSDs in RAID you can boost up-to 64 Gbps of bandwidth. Also included is an OC featured PCB you can mount outside on the chassis or test-bench, called the MSI OC Dashboard. Anyway, we'll show it all in detail of course. Have a peek at what we review today and then head on-wards into the review.