Review of the MSI B350M Mortar – Affordable Gaming Focused Ryzen Motherboard

We’ve
seen many different motherboards for AMD’s new Ryzen platform that focuses in
providing a well-rounded gaming experience for gamers. Sadly, most of these
motherboards usually don’t come cheap. The MSI B350M Mortar steers away the stereotypes
of fancy gaming motherboards, as it tries to provide the best value for
gamers. This motherboard is designed with various gaming-focused features which
elevates gaming experiences, while still remaining to be one of the most
affordable AM4 motherboard out in the market. Read on to find out more on what
the MSI B350M Mortar brings to the table!

Power Delivery and Military Grade Components

The MSI
B350M Mortar motherboard may look simple, but don’t let its first impressions
undermine its actual performance. Living up to their name, the MSI
B350M Mortar motherboard is poised to be very stable and reliable. MSI uses high-grade components on the motherboard, that are compliant to the
MIL-STD-810G military class specifications. These quality components also ensure the
longevity of the motherboard. Moreover, in terms of power delivery, the
motherboard has a dedicated 4+2 power phase for the CPU. Be it a quad core
Ryzen 3 or a octa core Ryzen 7 CPU, the motherboard has got what it takes to
power all of them. Such a design also enhances the stability of currents and voltages
applied across the CPU, which results in the overall stability of the system.
Of course, this motherboard, with the B350 chipset, does support overclocking,
but your mileage may vary, as the number of power phases are considerably
limited. We will put this motherboard to the test at the later part of this
article.

 

Interfaces and I/O

The
B350M Mortar has a rather comprehensive set of I/O ports. As a B350 based
motherboard, it also has a DVI port, Display port and a HDMI port for
support of future AMD APUs. These ports are actually disabled when used with the Ryzen
3/5/7 processors due to their lack of an iGPU. The motherboard rear I/O also features a total of 6 USB
ports, out of which 2 are USB 2.0, while the rest are USB 3.1 (Gen 1). One of
these USB 3.1 ports is also using the Type-C interface, which could be really
useful for current and upcoming USB Type-C products. Of course, there is also
the Gigabit LAN port and gold plated HD audio connectors.

 

The
motherboard also comes with 4 x SATA 6Gbps ports and even a M.2 port for
ultra-fast storage compatibility.

As a
gaming focused motherboard, the B350M Mortar also features 2 x PCIe x16 slots
for Multi-GPU support. More specifically, it supports AMD’s
CrossFireX technology. It also has 2 additional PCIe x1 slots for further
peripherals and interface expansions.

 

Gaming Features and Experiences

MSI
understand that good audio quality can dictate an overall gaming experience.
Therefore, they have specially designed the B350M Mortar with improved audio technologies.
Known as “Audio Boost”, the B350M Mortar spots high quality professional grade
capacitors that enhances the audio output. The whole audio chipset’s circuitry
is also largely separated from the main motherboard, reducing the noise and
interference for a clearer audio signal than traditional solutions.

 

Network
speed is also another fundamental factor to a good gaming experience,
especially for MMORPGs, fast-paced online FPS and MOBA games. MSI utilizes both hardware and software approaches to enhance the network performance. On the MSI B350M Mortar is a Realtek 8111H Gigabit LAN network controller. It prioritizes game packets over other general network packets, which improves the delivery rate and reduces latency with the Gaming LAN Manager application. The network
performance on games is complemented with MSI’s XBoost software, which tunes the system’s performance to different presets.

Performance and Test Setup

The
performance of an entire system is usually less dependent on the motherboard
with the same chipset. However, the overall circuitry design of a motherboard
can largely affect the overclockability of a system. We decided to test the
performance of the motherboard based on how well it can maintain a stable
overclock on the system. Here are the details of the hardware used in our test
setup.

Motherboard	MSI B350M Mortar
CPU	AMD Ryzen 4 1600X
RAM	Geil EVO X 16GB Kit
SSD	Intel P600 M.2 256GB
PSU	Cougar 650W
Graphics Card	ASUS GeForce GTX1050
OS	Windows 10 Enterprise 64bit

The Geil EVO X 16GB kit was pushed to 2933MHz with ease. This was achieved with a voltage of 1.35V applied across the memory. We will stick with this memory configuration throughout our tests.

Overclocking the CPU on the MSI B350M was very straightforward. This can be done directly through the MSI Command Center Software, or from the BIOS. MSI has designed both interfaces to be extremely intuitive, and changing of the settings was straightforward.

We managed to push our Ryzen 5 1600X to a high clock of 3.925GHz with minimal manual changes to voltages. This speed was achieved on all the cores in the CPU. We can see that the MSI B350M Mortar was able to provide enough power to the CPU to sustain the clock across all cores. Thanks to the stability and performance of this motherboard, we managed to gain an additional 71 points on the Cinebench R15 nThreads benchmark.

 

Conclusion

There’s
a Singaporean saying that “mai hiam buay pai”, which means that if one is not
too picky, the item is actually not bad. We did not expect too much from a $150
SGD motherboard, but the MSI B350M Mortar motherboard has exceeded our expectations
with unique features such as enhanced audio components for better sound
quality, and software that enhances network performance for games. It is a
no-frills motherboard for those who are on a tight budget, and just wants to
get things started for new their gaming rig. Despite it being a Micro-ATX
motherboard, is also quite feature rich with many I/O interfaces available. It
is undoubted that the MSI B350M Mortar motherboard offers great value to system
builders and thus deserves our Best Value Award for August 2017.