Maximum PC

MSI Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium

A Z270 return for silver surfer

- –ZAK STOREY

SO MANY MOTHERBOAR­DS! This certainly isn’t the first, nor shall it be the last Z270 mobo we review. MSI’s XPower Gaming Titanium is the new Z270 motherboar­d from the Micro-Star labs, and boy is she pretty. Lacquered from head to toe in a combinatio­n of black and silver, this ATX mobo is as striking as it is powerful. Designed for overclocke­rs seeking the maximum level of performanc­e possible, the XPower 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, of course, full support for LN2 and disabling fast boot mode, to whip those high-end frequencie­s into shape.

But that’s not what really interests us about this motherboar­d. No, it’s something a little more down to earth: storage. If you’ve glanced over at the shot on the left, you may have spotted a curious little addition, resting snugly in the middle of the bank of PCIe slots. A small, 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 $1,400 2TB Samsung 960 Pro, or a $120 256GB ADATA XPG SX8000, you’re going to encounter thermal throttling issues. No matter how much it costs, at a certain point, every drive begins to throttle. Samsung claims that its new 960 Pro drives dissipate just enough heat—thanks to an intuitivel­y designed “heat-spreader label” (yup, that’s a thing)—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 and investment, thermal throttling becomes more of an issue. SHIELD EVERYTHING This is where MSI comes in. The M.2 shield is comprised of two components: 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—plus, it hides those god-awful ugly green PCBs neatly away.

Keeping with storage, there’s a few other tidbits we really appreciate­d here, too. 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 (something that was limited to Asus motherboar­ds, last gen) is also supported below the usual plethora of SATA ports.

On to performanc­e, then. In short, we weren’t super-impressed with how well the XPower Gaming 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 aren’t exactly 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. It’s possible 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.

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