HH Do you know if the M.2 slots can be put in a raid config? If so, can you raid NVME M.2 drives?

No, there is no official support for that. Even then, you'd also seriously need to worry what that would bring you as one M2 slot is at PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 and the other is linked though the chipset and this is PCIe Gen 2.0 x2 links I believe it was.

Overclocking comparison @Hilbert as there have been a lot of bios releases since the first benchmarks, is there any chance we could get an overclocking comparison of all the 370 boards running the latest bioses? It wouldn't need lots of benchmarks just a comparison of max stable CPU overclock and the fastest memory settings achievable on each board. I think this would be really valuable in helping people decide which board to go for.

@Hilbert as there have been a lot of bios releases since the first benchmarks, is there any chance we could get an overclocking comparison of all the 370 boards running the latest bioses? It wouldn't need lots of benchmarks just a comparison of max stable CPU overclock and the fastest memory settings achievable on each board. I think this would be really valuable in helping people decide which board to go for.

All boards clock the same as the primary factor in tweaking isn't the motherboards, it is the processor. On air most CPUs can reach 4.0 GHz, with liquid cooling 4.1 maybe 4.0. Currently I am working on Ryzen 5 reviews, and even B350 motherboards offer precisely the same overclocking experience.

Hi Hilbert, Great review, as always 🙂 What would you think to adding a FLIR photo of the Motherboard under full load, with the Liquid Cooler installed ? It would give us a good look at what components might be getting warm, and i've seen that the memory power phases can get a bit warm too. Just a thought, so you can use that expensive FLIR camera some more 🙂

Really the only substandard benefit is the extra M2 slot and sure, it's nice looks.

I wonder if that was meant to say substantial. It's kind of sad these are the best things about a mobo so expensive, so in that sense they really are substandard as well, I guess.

40 fps behind in tomb-raider at 1080p? Even Fx 8320 is faster then ryzen there.Wow!

40 fps behind in tomb-raider at 1080p? Even Fx 8320 is faster then ryzen there.Wow!

I've come to the very unscientific conclusion that most games with really poor performance on Ryzen is not a problem with Ryzen but a problem with the game engine.

What wonders me is CPU-Z single threaded performance. According to it 1800X is almost on pair with i7-7700K. I'm suspecting that this test uses only one thread so there is no communication etc. and hence good score while in i.e. gaming there is more then one thread and communication latency issues happens. Also with this Quake2 experiment, software rendering, I don't know why Ryzen 1800X did locked itself at 3.8 GHz, it should skyrock to at least 4GHz or even (assuming good cooling) XFR kick in and push it over 4GHz.

youtube.com/watch?v=lN5mxFfkr7g

As for the gaming: welcome to modern society where Sales department rules over Development departments. Also in MadMax with Vulkan we can see huge improvement on nVidia Linux gaming side (AMD got improved, but not as much):

phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-vlk-madmax&num=2

So I think that issues, like one seen in ToomRider, are mostly issues with game itself. @HH Is it possible to test higher rated memory i.e. 3600MHz? According to support page:

msi.com/Motherboard/support/X370-XPOWER-GAMING-TITANIUM.html#support-mem

board should support up to 3866 mem, but probably that's overkill from value / performance point of view. PS. Regarding CPU-Z, it may be also that test itself is not memory intensive so all data is kept within L1-L3 cache and hence don't trigger memory issue.

Excellent review as always Hilbert. It got killer looks but the lack of features for that kind of money it's a deal breaker.

Do you know if the M.2 slots can be put in a raid config? If so, can you raid NVME M.2 drives?

Why exactly would you want to? Even SATA SSDs don't really have any real-world benefits from RAID. RAID0 would likely decrease performance due to CPU and PCIe overhead, and even overhead wasn't an issue, you wouldn't notice a difference in real-world results. If raw write performance is what you're looking for (so something like high-speed HD camera recordings) then I'd recommend looking into RAM drives. If write performance is what you want, well, it doesn't matter anyway because in most real-world tests, you wouldn't notice the difference between M.2 and SATA. If capacity is your priority, you'd be better off getting a SATA drive (they're much cheaper at larger capacities). I've thrown around the idea of doing doing 4x SATA drives in RAID0, but I tossed that idea out once I realized that in real-world scenarios, it doesn't accomplish anything. I'm just giving you a heads-up so you don't waste your time. SSDs nowadays are pretty reliable and have predictable lifespans, so RAID1 wouldn't be worth it either. Realistically, you're more likely to be the cause of data loss than hardware failure, in which case performing regular backups would be a more wise choice.

Ouch! The conclusion tells very well what Hilbert thinks of this board... And he has a point when a 300€ MB has this kind of issues. The MB makers really dropped the ball with Ryzen.

The A-XMP might perform better with newer BIOSes. I see 1.1 in the CPUZ screenshot, it's up to 1.3 now. https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/support/X370-XPOWER-GAMING-TITANIUM.html

I've come to the very unscientific conclusion that most games with really poor performance on Ryzen is not a problem with Ryzen but a problem with the game engine.

I do not know but I hope that is the case, Cause Fx 8-core being ahead is just like a slap in the face.I hope they can get this ironed-out I really would like to upgrade soon.

Even as a fan of MSI's products for quite a while now, it's nice to see such an objective review that calls them out for dropping the ball on this board. This kind of unbiased stuff is exactly the reason I come here first.

Asrock AGESA BIOS update ready http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming/index.asp#BIOS