MSI Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium
A Z270 return for the silver surfer.
MSI’s XPower Gaming Titanium is the new Z270 from the Micro-Star labs, and boy is she pretty. Lacquered in black and silver, this ATX motherboard is striking. Designed for overclockers seeking the maximum level of performance possible, it supports a plethora of overclocking choices, including voltage measure points, an additional section of PCB with onboard buttons to increase and decrease voltage and multiplier, and full support for LN2 and disabling fast boot mode, to whip those high-end frequencies into shape.
Resting snugly in the middle of the bank of PCIe slots is a thin, detailed strip of metallic alloy, adorned with the words ‘M.2 Shield’. It addresses one of the biggest issues M.2 PCIe drives face: thermal throttling. Regardless of whether you have a $1,699 2TB Samsung 960 Pro, or a $190 250GB 960 Evo, you’re going to encounter thermal throttling issues. Samsung claims that its new 960 Pro drives dissipate just enough heat that they don’t begin to throttle until after 333GB of data has been transferred on to or across from the device. That’s a hefty figure, but as you reduce price, thermal throttling becomes more of an issue.
This is where MSI comes in. The M.2 shield is comprised of the metal top and an additional thermal pad below the guard. This touches the very top of the memory chips on the M.2 drive, drawing heat up and away from it, and into what effectively becomes a heatsink. This means that more aggressive workloads can be handled for longer, without the drive throttling.
The inclusion of three M.2 ports, RAID-enabled for astronomical sequential reads and writes, is a nice touch. And although we’re still not certain whether it’s a dud or not, Intel’s U.2 connection standard is also supported below the usual plethora of SATA ports.
We weren’t super impressed with how well the Titanium performed this time around. As we write this, we’re still strictly under NDA, with Intel not set to launch its new Kaby Lake desktop experience for at least another two weeks — however, first impressions are hardly overwhelming, especially for an overclocking board. In our tests, we achieved lower overclocks, with higher voltages, across our testing range. The XPower needed 1.3V on the Vcore to achieve 5GHz on our current Core i7-7700K, versus the ASUS Maximus IX Hero’s 1.27V. It achieved a maximum stable overclock of 5.0GHz, versus the ASUS’s 5.1GHz. And the lowest voltage we managed to keep the core running stable with at stock was a dismal 1.09V, versus the Hero’s 1.07V.
Now, you could say we’re splitting hairs here, but the Hero is designed to be a mainstream board, while the XPower is aimed at the upper echelons of world record breakers. We may see some improvement in the future, thanks to BIOS updates and software reworkings but, for the time being at least, the XPower doesn’t quite hit the mark.