MSI B360M Mortar Titanium Review

Performance Analysis

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There are a couple of things going against the MSI B360M Mortar Titanium in terms of performance: memory speed, which is 333MHz lower than our usual 3,000MHz, plus the lack of any kind of enhanced turbo, although unless that's applied by default we don't manually enable it anyway. In most of the multi-threaded content creation benchmarks, things weren't too bad. In fact, in HandBrake we noticed no difference, with the time of 84 seconds the same as most Z370 boards we've tested. We didn't see too much of a drop in PC Mark 10s Photo Editing test either, but things were noticeably slower in Terragen 4 and a tad sluggish in Cinebench too.

Game performance seemed to take the biggest hit, though, such as a 42fps minimum in Ashes of the Singularity compared to the usual 46fps, and 3DMark Time Spy was a couple of hundred points lower than the usual stock speed scores at 7,594 compared to between 7,800  and 8,000. The board was also a little slow on the M.2  read speed and SATA 6Gbps write speeds, but only by small margins. The audio performance was unsurprisingly poor (relatively) thanks to the older Realtek ALC 892 codec being used, being roughly 20dBA adrift compared to the average dynamic range of most other boards with ALC 1220 and a similar amount on the noise level too.

Conclusion

Thankfully, we do have some fairly direct comparisons to make with Z370 boards here, as MSI also offers a Z370 version of the Mortar, albeit without the luscious titanium finish, for around £40 more here in the UK. It has fairly similar specifications too, apart from those we've already mentioned relating to bandwidth and I/O, with the same audio codec and number of SATA ports, so it's quite clear that if you're willing to accept the memory speed cap and lack of overclocking, you can save yourself a tidy sum - exactly what these cheaper chipsets should do.

There's also a strong case against opting for the bottom of the barrel as far as Z370 boards go. Firstly, to find something this cheap you'd be looking at a one-time sale and secondly, the boards often come with woeful cooling. Finally, even the likes of MSI's own Z370-A Pro, which retails for around £100, still don't look anywhere near as good as the B360M Mortar Titanium. As a result, if you want a great looking Coffee Lake-compatible board with plenty of premium features including future-proofing gubbins such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 headers and M.2 ports, but overclocking is not and never will be in your repertoire, then the B360M Mortar Titanium is a great choice.