MSI X370 SLI Plus
$229 | AU.MSI.COM MSI’s back in black, but is it poised to attack?
Unlike similarly priced and positioned offerings from the competition, the sleek design queues of MSI’s X370 SLI Plus makes for an AMD ‘board that demands interest through intrigue, rather than shouting.
This intrigue runs through to the component selection and feature implementation. Scrutinise the specs and some unexpected choices emerge. For example, the six SATA 6Gbps ports seem like an odd selection, given X370 boards typically sport eight. Furthermore, the use of a Realtek 8111H NIC for LAN is usually found on an entrylevel B350-based ‘ board, with Intel I211-AT or I219V used for these higher-end X370 deployments. This spec switch extends to the audio codec, too, with the X370 SLI Plus using the Realtek ALC892 instead of the Realtek ALC1220 found on most other X370 ‘ boards.
Essentially, when it comes to specs, the X370 SLI Plus feels like a cross between MSI’s B350 Tomahawk and its X370 Gaming Pro Carbon, on both spec and price positioning.
The SLI Plus was largely on par with other X370 motherboards we’ve reviewed — that is: great across multi-core intensive tasks like video encoding and 3D rendering, and generally able to match Intel’s far more expensive Broadwell-E/X99 gear at higher-resolution gaming.
Our 1080p gaming test results were still, however, a little lower than Intel’s, although just as we went to print, AMD released a patch that was intended to correct this shortcoming, so we’ll revisit this soon. (Regardless, Ryzen is still going to be an expensive platform if you’re just aiming for 1080p gaming.)
We hit a few hiccups in testing, however. An unexpected crash occurred while running PCMark, and again during a 3DMark run. Though we did ultimately manage multiple successful benchmark passes, the crash outlier is still not an expected or wanted experience. Unfortunately, a much more significant performance issue occurred while testing Far Cry Primal, a title proven to be sensitive to memory. Regardless of the massaging of different system voltages to eke out stability for our test settings, we simply couldn’t get a crash-free run of Far Cry Primal.
Visually, the SLI Plus is dressed in a sleek all-black component selection with silver-chrome accents, which the designers have used to create line work that breaks up areas that might otherwise appear chunky, such as the rear I/O cover and heatsink for VRM and PCH.
Perhaps a missed opportunity during the design phase, the motherboard features minimal LED illumination qualifications. With RGB LEDs restricted to the rearlit LED lighting of the PCB gap for the audio solution and a single RGB header for LED strips, we can’t help but feel this could have been beefed up more, especially given the overall subdued colour scheme of the motherboard.
Putting aside the issues we experienced with Far Cry Primal and a couple of random crashes, the MSI X370 SLI Plus was a delight to use. And compared to pre-launch and early launch X370 setups, it was a breeze, but ultimately... there’s just nothing particularly headline-worthy about this board, making it a bit of an ‘also-ran’ that’s hard to recommend.