MSI B360M Mortar Titanium Review

👤by Vortez Reviews Comments 📅03-04-18
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.

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