MSI MPG B560i Gaming Edge Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi 6E isn’t restricted to high end boards
The MSI MPG B560i Gaming Edge Wi-Fi is one of very few B560 Mini-ITX offerings. It incorporates a bit of a retro spectrum analyser aesthetic. We thought the look was a bit garish on the MSI Z590 Gaming Carbon, but here it looks really nice. These days you can pack a lot of tech onto an ITX board with less need for auxiliary controllers or expansion cards. Yet for some reason ITX hasn’t really caught on outside of its dedicated base. There’s nothing really stopping you from running an 11900K with an RTX 3090 and 64GB of RAM in this little board.
The MSI B560i Gaming Edge features a basic VRM. This is partly due to space constraints. The 6+2+1 phase design is powered by a single 8-pin power connector. During our testing with a stock 11900K, we saw a VRM temperature reading of 73c which is the highest we’ve seen out of the 500 series motherboards we’ve tested to date. Though it still within spec, it illustrates that you need decent airflow to keep the VRM cool with Rocket Lake processors. Don’t forget that more 96
WINTER 2021 worldly 11th Gen processors will not face any VRM temperature issues.
You get 4x SATA and 2x M.2 slots. The front one is the PCIe 4.0 slot which is cooled by a heatsink. The rear slot on the back of the PCB doesn’t have a heatsink, and due to typically poor airflow in this area, do keep an eye on your drive temperatures. This configuration reveals a major weakness of the ITX form factor in the age of M.2 slots. There just isn’t enough PCB space to accommodate multiple drives.
The rear I/O is weak point of the board. You get Type-A and Type- C USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. That’s it. It’s not enough. Other ports include HDMI 2.0b and DP 1.4. The budget ALC897 links to three analogue audio ports, though there’s no S/PDIF. If the selection of USB ports is poor, the same can’t be said of the boards’ networking with Realtek 2.5G Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E, which is very rare for B560.
Performance wise the little MSI performed as we’d expect with our 11900K. It proves to be very competitive in the gaming tests but it tends to trail ever so slightly in multithreaded benchmarks. We believe that power management is the reason for performance fluctuations rather than any design weakness.
MSI B560i Gaming Edge sits in a bit of a difficult position. Fans of ITX have only a handful of options and if you’re looking to build a small form factor system with good networking then you’ll be happy. The problem is the ATX boards at this price feature better power delivery and bigger heatsinks. They offer more SATA and M.2 ports and more USB ports. At this price the Asus B560-F is a tough competitor as is MSI’s own very highly regarded B560 Tomahawk. If you don’t need a ton of expansion capability then you’ll be fine but we feel that the board doesn’t offer enough at this price. If you are looking to go down the ITX path it’s certainly a solid choice, but this little MSI leaves us wanting more.