MSI B360M Mortar Titanium Review

The Micro ATX Mortar mortherboard is back under the new B360 chipset, with the added bonus of the unique Titanium skin. Want a mini-powerhouse that doesn’t cost the earth?

Product on Review: B360M Mortar Titanium
Manufacturer & Sponsor: MSI
Street Price: £100 GBP – $100 USD – $169 AUD

The Intel 300-Series platform made its first appearance towards the end of last year. The Intel Z370 chipset is of course reserved for enthusiasts and gamers who want access to the full-range of features including the ability to overclock Intel K-Series CPUs.

Following on from the success of Intel Z370, today Intel unveils the H370, B360 and H310 chipsets; all of which focus on mainstream users who do not require all of the features Z370 brings, nor the heavier price-tag. The new chipsets are designed to appeal to system builders wanting a better value for money experience when pairing up with a non-K Intel Coffee Lake CPU such as the Intel Core i7-8700, Core i5-8400 or Core i3-8100.

In our next review we have the MSI B360M Mortar Titanium in the spotlight. This motherboard dips into two of MSI’s renowned series – Mortar (Micro-ATX) and Titanium (Grey, contrast design). A brief glimpse of the styling quickly reveals a rather unique looking solution which is sure to turn heads and allow those wanting to create a light coloured theme with a good foundation.

About MSI

As a world leading gaming brand, MSI’s goal is to become the most trusted name in gaming and e-sport. We’ve dedicated countless hours and committed numerous resources to the eSports community to support the world’s most aspiring and best gamers and use their knowledge and expertise in our products in return. The insistence on 100% in-house design and manufacturing gives MSI the solid capability to implement innovative ideas and optimized design in our products.

Intel B360 Chipset Overview

One of the fundamental things about Intel B360 when we consider a comparison against Intel Z370 is the lack of overclocking support (even with a K-SKU processor).

Below is a comparison table between B360 and Z370. Other things to note is that for storage, B360 doesn’t support RAID configurations. There are also less CPU PCI-E lanes available and less USB ports.

Packaging & First Look

Titanium arrives in a square box which alludes to this motherboards form factor – packaging is decent quality, attractive and protects the board inside. Over the on the reverse there is a diagram of Titanium with a breakdown of all the significant features.

Opening the box up, there are just a small selection of accessories included in the bundle. MSI include: User guide, quick install guide, rear IO shield, two SATA cables, case badge, driver CD, registration card and screws.

Removing Titanium from its packaging we are met by a very distinct looking motherboard. This design isn’t something new to MSI’s line up – we’ve reviewed other Titanium models before.

Using the name “Titanium” links to the grey livery which sees the PCB and other key areas take on a totally unique appearance. Those wanting to work to a theme which is in contrast to the customary dark styling which most motherboards utilise nowadays will find this board very appealing. We have to admit, MSI has done a superb job on the visual appearance!

Titanium conforms to the Micro-ATX form factor, measuring: 24.4cm x 24.4cm with eight mounting holes.

Over the page we’ll explore Titanium’s features in more detail.

Closer Look

Since this motherboard is designed to work in conjunction with Intel’s 8th Generation Processors, Titanium uses socket LGA 1151. This socket is surrounded by two substantial heatsinks – both are independent and not joined. This motherboard takes advantage of a 7+2 digital phase design and CPU power consists of an 8-pin socket.

MSI has included just one CPU fan header near the socket – as opposed to providing two, which is standard practise nowadays. In total there are just four fan headers (including the CPU fan header) and sadly there is no designated pump header for use with a liquid cooler.

Memory support arrives in the form of dual-channel DDR4 – up to 64GB and DDR4 2666/2400/2133MHz. As we’ve seen in the past, DDR4 Boost makes an appearance – providing clean signals to and from the memory/CPU.

The memory slots have been given some reinforcement via steel covers.

Also located in this area we have the EZ Debug LED panel which helps to identify any problems with BOOT, VGA, DRAM or CPU on bootup. Immediately next to the 24-pin ATX, there is a single USB 3.1 header which, while it may not be widely supported by most cases, is great to see for futureproof.

Looking at the storage, Titanium has just four SATA 3 (6GB/s) ports – two are right angled and the other two are top-facing.

Just behind the SATA ports there is a small heatsink sat over the B360 chip – this is notably smaller than other motherboards using the same chipset, this therefore hints that such large, oversized heatsinks are not required for the Intel B360 Express chipset.

Due to the size of this motherboard there are less PCI Express to use but its pleasing to see that even though Micro-ATX does apply a certain limitation we still get:

• 2x PCI Express 3.0 X16 (Modes – 16, 4)
• 2x PCI Express 3.0 X1

There is more steel reinforcement on the uppermost X16 slot which should help with the large, heavy graphics cards currently on the market.

Among the PCI Express we have two M.2 SSD slots, these slots support PCI Express Gen3.

Along the bottom of the motherboard we have a single 12v RGB header for use with RGB lighting strips via Mystic Light.

The audio components can be seen in the bottom-left of Titanium and this takes advantage of the Realtec ALC 892 codec. All of the audio components are separated to avoid electrical interference and there are high-end audio CAPs helping deliver warmer sounds. The isolation line is RGB and can be adjusted via Mystic Light.

Casting an eye over the back panel, there are quite an assortment of options to choose from for connectivity. Available here we have:

2x USB 2.0 ports
1x PS2 Keyboard/Mouse combo port
1x DVI-D port
1x DisplayPort
1x HDMI port
1x Gigabit LAN via Intel i219-V controller
2x USB 2.0 ports
2x USB 3.1 Gen2 ports (Type C and Type A)
6x Gold plated Audio jacks with optical S/PDIF

The back panel provides us with a good selection of functionality although we’re disappointed to see so many USB 2.0 – this standard should now be phased out in favour of USB 3.0/3,1.

Video: BIOS Tour

To demonstrate the options and navigation across the MSI BIOS, we’ve captured usage with the Epiphan AV.iO 4K. To view the video simply click on this link or click on the video below:

Test Setup & Methodology

Test Setup

CPU Intel Core i7-8700K
Cooling Corsair H150i Pro RGB
Motherboard MSI B360M Mortar Titanium
Memory 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000MHz
Graphics AMD RX 480
Storage OCZ Vector 180 240GB SSD
PSU Corsair HX1000 80 Plus Platinum Certified PSU
Monitor AOC U2879VF
Capture Device Epiphan AV.iO 4K

Benchmarks

Cinebench R15 – CPU/OpenGL Score
x264 HD 4.0 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware SANDRA – CPU & Memory benchmarks
POV-RAY – CPU benchmarks
TrueCrypt – CPU benchmarks
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks & Memory
PCMark 8 – Home Suite & Photoshop
3DMark FireStrike – 3D Benchmark
Games – Civilization IV & Total War: WARHAMMER

Other Software

Temperature Analysis: Real Temp
Stress Testing Software: AIDA64 Stability Test
CPU Specification Monitoring: CPU-Z

Overclocking

Since the Intel B360 Express chipset isn’t designed for overclocking this section is omitted from our review.

Benchmarks: Power Consumption

It’s interesting to note the power consumption across all motherboards. Although they are using the Z370/B360 chipset, energy results can fluctuate between manufacturers due to the features and specifications that are integrated. First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed – the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use and then the system is loaded with 3DMark FireStrike – watts are again monitored for the duration of the test and the highest rated wattage result is then noted down. Below are the results of this energy test.

Benchmarks: Cinebench R15

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus and many more.

Benchmarks: X264 HD

Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.

Benchmarks: POV-RAY

Persistence of Vision Raytracer’s PovRay is a free and open source 3D animator application with versions for computers with different operating systems.

This product allows users to build their custom 3D worlds with excellent quality despite their computer’s hardware. It has adjustable options for levels of radiance, refraction, and reflection. Calculation time may vary depending on the computer model, but PovRay can adapt to many computer builds, and is supported by the open source community.

Benchmarks: TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is a discontinued source-available freeware utility used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or (under Microsoft Windows except Windows 8 with GPT) the entire storage device (pre-boot authentication).

Benchmarks: AIDA64

AIDA64 Product Page

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA

SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU and memory tests.

Benchmarks: PCMark 8 & PCMark 10

PCMark 8 combines performance benchmarking with battery life measurement and includes tests based on popular Adobe and Microsoft applications. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 will help you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs. It’s the complete PC performance benchmark for home and business.

Benchmarks: PCMark 8 Photoshop

The PCMark 8 Applications benchmark measures system performance using popular applications from the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. You can choose which tests to run based on the applications installed on your system. Each test automatically steps through a series of actions such as opening, editing and saving a file. The results are used to calculate the PCMark 8 Applications scores for the system.

Benchmarks: 3DMark FireStrike & TimeSpy

3DMark FireStrike Product Page

Fire Strike is our new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today. Fire Strike will only be available in the Windows editions of 3DMark initially.

Benchmarks: VRMark

VRMark Product Page

The performance requirements for VR games are much higher than for typical PC games. So if you’re thinking about buying an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift, wouldn’t you like to know that your PC is ready for VR?

Benchmarks: ROT Tomb Raider & Total War: WARHAMMER

It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because gamers will want to know if there are any significant benefits. So here we have two recent gaming titles.

Conclusion

The Micro ATX form factor is often overlooked in favour of full ATX counterparts, but the demand for this configuration category is most certainly there – just recently we’ve had a variety of computer case brands engineering new M-ATX cases for system builders (one of which is the Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L.

The B360M Mortar Titanium supplies those system builders with pretty much everything they need to take a slice of Intel’s 8th Generation Processors. Whether we’re looking to the back panel with flexible video output options, twin M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs or dual-PCI Express for a multi-GPU configuration, this motherboard covers all of the basics very well and adds in some extra support to build a solid system.

There are however a few things to note – just four fan headers are present, no designated pump header and only one CPU fan header. There is only one 12v RGB header located on the motherboard and there are four USB 2.0 headers on the back panel; we expect this to be replaced by USB 3.0/3.1.

By crafting a motherboard in a grey livery as MSI has done with Titanium, we have a very unique piece of kit in our hands. This is welcomed in a market which is flooded with dark, monochrome and seemingly characterless solutions – we applaud their creativity with this distinct, head-turner!

Our performance feedback only concerns stock application due to B360 offering no overclocking features, but what we can say is that Titanium offers up reliable performance figures when compared against other offerings out there. We reported consistent results throughout our series of tests and can vouch for this being a good choice to go with under the B360 chipset.

The cost of the motherboard around the globe see it sit at £100 GBP – $100 USD – £169 AUD. This is very reasonable considering what’s on offer and MSI also include a 2 year warranty to solidify a purchase.

B360M Mortar Titanium may be small but it packs in a decent selection of features and is an impressive motherboard for creating a budget system.

Pros
+ Distinct, unique physical design
+ Great for building a compact system
+ Offers brilliant performance
+ Arrives with USB 3.1 front header
+ Features twin M.2 slots
+ Audio solution is good
+ Feature-packed BIOS

Cons
– Just four fan headers in total
– Still using USB 2.0 ports

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Stay connected with the Vortez Social Media pages:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram