Introduction

We're back with another MSI board review, but this time, it is with something truly different. This time, we have MSI's Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM with us. While this is yet another board with a mouthful of a name, it is again one whose name nicely describes exactly what you're going to get from this silvery PCB. Yes, I said silver, but maybe I meant TITANIUM?

Within the past few years, MSI has undergone a distinct change in the products they produce for us, and that change has been a great one. There is a true focus in MSI's designs, and in such a way that you cannot deny that MSI is listening to its users and making sure they develop products they know their end users will enjoy. MPOWER for overclocking hard. GAMING is pretty self-explanatory. TITANIUM because it's built to be tougher than steel. Those are three things that don't roll into the same product to me, at least not in ways that have been hugely successful. I digress, though, and am definitely nit-picking. Yet if you're going to pay top dollar for a motherboard, you want to know it's going to work and work well, right?

You all have asked for something other than black, blue, and green PCBs. We've got some boards that depart from that, but MSI's Z170A MPOWER GAMING TITANIUM throws all those past aesthetics to the wind, and tosses a metallic finish on top of a white PCB with little bits of black here and there. There are dual M.2 slots which support RAID, USB 3.1 Gen2, and a host of other high-performance features, including DDR4 BOOST, Audio Boost, and GAME Boost, all tied together by a set of components built to withstand whatever overclock you want to throw at them to then stay at those overclocked limits. This is THE board for the discriminate gamer who wants Intel's Z170 and Skylake CPUs.

Specifications