MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium Review

Performance Analysis

In general, the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium performs very well. It gained top spots in many of the graphs and did especially well in multi-threaded tests such as Cinebench and Terragen, where it was slightly ahead of the rest of the field at stock speed. It was a little slow in 3DMark Time Spy, but then came back with the top spot in VRMark, with these differences likely to be within the normal variation in results anyway.


There was very little difference elsewhere, while in the audio tests it was again a fairly strong showing, although Asus still has the best results with its Crosshair VI Hero overall. There were no issues to report in the storage tests, and once again MSI performed very well when it came to the M.2 speed tests, although it's worth reiterating that the lower M.2 slot will see much slower speeds, as it's only PCI-E 2.0.

Despite lacking a few megahertz in the overclock department, the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium was able to keep up with the rest of the field and even posted the fastest result in Time Spy, with the overclock offering massive performance boosts thanks to all cores sitting at 4GHz.

Conclusion

With Ryzen being a very value-conscious range of CPUs, high-end motherboards perhaps face an even tougher task of appealing to enthusiasts than their Intel siblings. At £300, you're looking at nearly three times the price of many B350 chipset AM4 boards, and as we saw with the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3, most are able to overclock just as well as their X370 counterparts, even with 8-core CPUs.

As a mainstream board, the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium represents fairly poor value, as even the Asus Crosshair VI Hero is considered expensive, while for £100 less you can bag the Gigabyte Aorus AX370-Gaming 5 that has plenty of useful enthusiast-orientated features.

We can't help but love the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium, though. It looks fantastic, has nearly everything you could want for both current high-end hardware and future features, and is definitely a better option than a B350 motherboard if you have lots of hard disks, SSDs, and USB devices to deal with. It's clearly aimed at serious Ryzen overclockers, though, so has a generous helping of extreme features, and considering the enhanced paint job, additional M.2 port, and USB 3.1 header, there is a select few out there that will love it despite its price tag.