MSI Z170A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM (LGA 1151) Review

BIOS and Overclocking

The Click BIOS looks almost exactly the same as other MSI BIOS in previous months with the only noticeable addition being the GAME BOOST button/dial in the top left.

Scrolling through the different EZ Mode tabs, you can cycle between CPU, Memory, Storage and Fans.

The Fan control is extremely basic here, but you have a more advanced version further on in the BIOS.

The Help tab doesn’t really offer anything apart from what the GAME BOOST dial can achieve when used. Be warned, if your CPU can’t handle Set 6 – 11, it won’t boot and could cause problems.

Here we have the more in-depth fan controller than earlier and a much better option to use if you do not have an external fan controller.

In this view, the GAME BOOST dial has been tweaked through the BIOS and changed to SW (Software) mode. This is a less intrusive way of doing this and doesn’t require you to open your case every time you want to play.

Moving on to the more advanced BIOS, the top banner is exactly the same which is nice to see a consistent theme tieing it all together.

The settings on this motherboard are superior to almost every other motherboard I’ve tested apart from the GODLIKE Gaming which is the bigger badder brother.

The same quantity of settings follows through to the overclocking tab, but I feel that all of the settings under a single tab can get confusing. Maybe splitting it up like the setting tabs would be a good idea here.

If you have a habit of overclocking for whatever reason, you can save your profiles here to instantly restore whenever you want. This could be particularly good to weed out poor RAM and CPU’s if you are a system builder.

The board explorer is extremely similar to that of the rest of the MSI range except this has the XPOWER Titanium board as the skin.

If you hover over any of the components it will tell you what is installed. If you hover over the IO ports, you get an overlay with a close up of the ports with what’s installed.

Overclocking

As you would expect, overclocking was an absolute breeze, but it seems out chip has lost a bit of its puff and now requires around 1.5v to achieve 4.8GHz.