MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium Edition Review

Performance Analysis

At stock speed the Titanium Edition was potent and came top or near top in most of our tests, with a particularly good effort in the rendering benchmarks and game tests. It had a comparatively high idle and load power draw at stock too, which probably explains the extra performance due to a particularly aggressive turbo frequency that saw it use 20W more than the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 under load and a sizeable 29W at idle.


It maintained its dominance once overclocked with a top result in the video editing test, second in photo editing and competitive results in the rendering tests too with a similar story in our 3D tests. One fly in the ointment came with the Intel SATA 6Gbps speeds, where the write speed was lower than we'd expect by around 20MB/sec, while the M.2 performance was also a tad lower than the rest of the field.

Power consumption once overclocked was again quite high at idle at 95W and despite a fairly low vcore, under load too - second only to the Asus Z170-Deluxe , although the rest of the field wasn't that far behind. Audio performance was excellent, though, with the joint top results on test using RightMark Audio Analyser - second only to the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 using the Creative What you hear stereo mix function and not our usual test method.

Conclusion

Performance wise, there's a lot to like with the Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium Edition. It's fast at stock speed and overclocks well and very easily too - made even easier by a wealth of overclocking tools, both software and hardware based such as the included OC dashboard. It sports excellent onboard audio and includes several features Asus includes with its top-end boards as well such as RAM disk software and HOTKEY.

Apart from the dual M.2 ports, though, there's not a vast amount else here compared to something like the Maximus VIII Hero, which costs around £40 less. Except, of course, those gorgeous aesthetics, which combined with the other additional features such as the OC dashboard, PCI-E slot toggle switches and voltage readout points to name a few, just about warrant the extra outlay. It's otherwise not quite as good value as the Maximus VIII Hero and it's close to the cost of the lust-worthy Z170 Deluxe too, but the Titanium Edition has carved out a little niche of its own that's extreme in its own little way and as it will likely have some reaching for their wallets irrespective of the price, it definitely deserves our Extreme Ultra award.