The MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium Motherboard Review: A Silver Flagship
by Gavin Bonshor on April 13, 2018 8:00 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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Topweasel - Saturday, April 14, 2018 - link
Qasar,That is a terrible response to a little bit of critcism. If you don't want to read my criticism then don't read the comments or go back to reading PC mag or the newspaper (doesn't feel good to be told what to do because you disagree does it). I have been reading Anandtech for 20+ years now and they are by far the best site for reviews, when they review stuff. I am not criticizing them for the quality of review, I am not even really criticizing them for the time of the review though it may seem like it. All I have said is that it would behoove them to be more transparent on oddities like this series of reviews, instead of giving a bunch non-straight responses like they did at the end of page one. That it brings on and promotes speculation, some of which Ryan specifically wants to avoid because even when unfounded it's something he has been actively trying to avoid since Anandtech was sold.
I want to applaud Ryan and Ian's and the rest of the teams works over the year and while it's still not the same without Anand. It is still better than I ever could have thought it would be post losing him. But this is one point that I feel Anand would have gotten right. He would be as straight a shooter as possible even if it ruffled a few feathers.
Reflex - Sunday, April 15, 2018 - link
I suppose you could apply for a full refund...philehidiot - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
I DEMAND my refund!stevekgoodwin - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
Topweasel: "All I have said is that it would behoove them to be more transparent".You actually said this:
Topweasel: "That the secrecy behind reviewing products this late into the cycle has more to do with Purch's relationship with Intel and not down to workload."
I'm off to listen to Weasel Stomping Day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k76IGLi6jWI
CrazyElf - Saturday, April 14, 2018 - link
Ian, the problem with the Nikos PowerPAK PK616BA MOSFETs are that this board is a lot more expensive than other boards that offers significantly better Mosfets - such as the X370 Taichi which is even cheaper.I mean, had this board been priced more aggressively, this would not have been an issue.
Hint: MSI - I own 2 Intel XPower boards on mainstream and on X99, an MSI X99A Godlike, I have bought 4 MSI Lightning GPUs, 2 290X Lightning and 2x 1080Ti Lightnings - but you will lose customers like me if you keep doing releasing sub-par products.
I have no issues paying a premium for a flagship - but the flagship must be worthy of a flagship title.
Koenig168 - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
I considered this board when building a new rig back in December. Compared to the Intel versions of the Titanium, this is a mid-range board with flagship pricing and aesthetics.johnparker1 - Wednesday, April 18, 2018 - link
The problem with the Nokis Power Pak is still occurring and I am not getting any solutions related to this, I have also checked on the one website where some sort of support is available.johnparker1 - Wednesday, April 18, 2018 - link
The problem with the Nokis Power Pak is still occurring and I am not getting any solutions related to this, I have also checked on the one https://appletechsupportnumber.net/ipod-support/ where some sort of support is available.MarkJohn - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
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