MSI Z370 SLI Plus Review

Overclocking

We've had a couple of boards that were a tad wobbly when it came to overclocking, either requiring additional power settings to be tweaked, loadline calibration to be bumped up, or simply high voltages. 

Thankfully, none of the above applied to the Z370 SLI Plus, which managed a rock-solid 5GHz with our Core i7-8700K by applying a vcore of 1.28V.

This vcore is slightly higher than some other boards we've tested but low enough to be easily tameable by an all-in-one liquid-cooler, with our CPU hovering around the 80°C mark under load in Prime95 - a fantastic result for such a cheap motherboard.

We've covered MSI's current EFI and software in depth in a recent article which you can see here.

Performance Analysis

You'd expect a mature platform such as Z370 to offer consistently high results in graphs this far down the line, and this was certainly true for the Z370 SLI Plus, which rarely strayed far from the top of the graphs. The content creation results were all solid, and only a slight slip in 3DMark Time Spy allowed a fly into the ointment. Even the power numbers were extremely low, bettering MSI's own mini-ITX Z370I Gaming Pro Carbon AC. Audio performance was on the money too with results typical of the Realtek ALC1220 codec and a particularly low THD.

The content creation results show what a beast the Core i7-8700K is once overclocked too, with significant drops in the timed benchmarks such as HandBrake and Terragen 4 and over 200 points being added to the Cinebench score, which rose from 1,416 to 1,627 when we pushed the all-core frequency to 5GHz.

Conclusion

With a budget-friendly price tag, the MSI Z370 SLI Plus is already an attractive proposition, but it excels in terms of performance, overclocking, and aesthetics for the money. It has plenty of ports, USB 3.1 support, dual M.2 ports, Realtek ALC1220 audio, and it reached our CPU's maximum 5GHz quite easily. Coupled with MSI's excellent EFI and software, the Z370 SLI Plus isn't just a great board for those on a budget, it also offers features and performance that allow it to trade blows with the big boys at a fraction of the cost.