The Board - Layout

The MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM is a silver board, top to bottom, with little bits of black. The rear of the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM is covered by a metal backplate, so you can safely install large video cards and heavy CPU coolers.


The socket area is pretty open, with close attention paid to cooler clearance both front and rear. There's a cutout in the backplate to make installation the same as it would be on any other board.


The six expansion slots on the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM consist of three PCIe 3.0 X16 slots and three PCIe 3.0 x2 slots. DIMM support includes slots for four memory modules, with support for speeds of up to 3866 MHz out of the box.


There are two M.2 ports with RAID support. The one on top is capable of holding ultra-long 110mm M.2 devices.


The rear backplate has digital video connectivity and USB 3.1 Type-C. Pretty standard stuff. Drive connectivity includes a U.2 port and six SATA 6 Gb/s ports.


The board's bottom edge has quite a few pin headers, but very few USB 2.0 ones. There are a couple SATA ports and a switch of some sort on the right side, though.