The Board - A Closer Look

It's not often we see motherboards trying to be large chunks of metal. MSI took the titanium idea and went to town with the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM, sparing no expense.


First comes the special metal backplate. With constant thermal cycles, large PCBs with large coolers attached can sag a little, so this backplate serves as support to enable the use of larger coolers over the long term. The attention to detail is high even on this part, with close inspection of the screws that hold on the backpalte revealing that they have little felt pads installed so that they don't scratch up the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM's silver surface.


With the cooler removed, you see some details that are hidden by the backplate, such as a revealing look at the white PCB under the silver paint on top of the circuit board. Of course, being an MSI motherboard with DDR4 support, MSI's DDR4 BOOST is present on the MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM.


The DIMM VRM is part of the DDR4 BOOST design, with a dual-channel power section ready to push your sticks to the limit. I also removed one of the CPU VRM coolers to check on what MOSFETS are installed.


The MSI Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM uses a 6-layer PCB, as revealed by the "window" through the PCB that shows each individual layer.


The chipset cooler is a large flat surface made out of a black-coated heatsink with a painted silver cover and MSI's dragon head logo. The audio section also got some special treatment.


I found a Realtek ALC1150 CODEC hidden under the plastic cover, mated with some other fairly high-spec audio capacitors and such. The provided electrical isolation, however, is far and above what we've seen on other boards, with nearly complete isolation here, end to end.


I found an Intel LAN controller and an ASMedia USB driver.


There's a provided dual-digit POST display as well as a bank of LEDs that indicate due to what area of the board a boot failure might have occurred. The LEDs light up in succession as the board boots, and whatever phase of the POST process the board is in when it freezes will remain lit, making for a quick and easy diagnosis.


The requisite IDT BCLK aid is here to enable CPU BCLK overclocking. You can also monitor your voltages easily in real-time using the provided measuring points, using a separately purchased multi-meter, of course.


A Nuvoton Super I/O provides for decent fan control options to all ports and system monitoring, and MSI even tossed in a "SLOW MODE" switch for those who might want to take the Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM sub-zero.