MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi Motherboard Review - Packed and stacked Mini-ITX

TweakTown Rating: 88%

Our Verdict

MSI's little X870I board is a strong contender for the best AM5 ITX board, though it's a pricey one.

Pros

• Three M.2 slots
• 27W USB PD
• Lovely white/silver design
• No bandwidth sharing
• 10,000 MT/s memory support

Cons

• It's expensive
• VRM gets hot
• The embedded VRM fan isn't very effective

Should you buy it?

AvoidConsiderShortlistBuy

Buy at Amazon for $399.99 USD

Buy at Newegg for $420.92 USD

Buy at Amazon for $599.99 CAD

Buy at Newegg for $586.43 CAD

Buy at Amazon for £552.69

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

It's not easy to pack the features of an ATX X870 board onto a Mini-ITX PCB, but if it can't be done in two dimensions, why not three? The MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi features a 5-in-1 vertical Xpander card, adding extra connectivity options that make it arguably the most feature-rich Mini-ITX board on the market, though it comes at a price.

The MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi is a part of MSI's Performance Gaming series. MPG boards are in the middle of the stack, between the high-end MSI Enthusiast Gaming (MEG) boards and the entry-level Arsenal Gaming (MAG) boards. Although the Evo nomenclature might suggest this is a refresh board, it's actually MSI's first Mini-ITX X870 motherboard, though there has been a B850 version on the market for some time.

The X870I Edge Ti Evo manages to include most of what you'd expect from an X870 board. You get a PCIe 5.0 expansion slot, WiFi 7, USB4, 5G LAN, and, interestingly for a mini-TX board, three M.2 slots. MSI also claims the board supports DDR5-10000 with a Ryzen 8000-series APU.

One of the more interesting inclusions is an actively cooled VRM heatsink. That's not too much of a surprise, as we'll see later, the VRM of the X870I Edge Ti Evo is definitely on the warm side. The confines of an SFF case seem to necessitate it.

Aesthetically, the board really looks the part. White or silver-themed boards have such a clean look.

The MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi is priced at $429, which is a little more than the competing ASUS ROG Strix X870-I Gaming and some $140 more than the GIGABYTE X870I AORUS Pro Ice.

Best Deals: MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi Motherboard

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	$399.99 USD	$399.99 USD	$379.65 USD	Buy
	$420.92 USD	-	$399.99 USD	Buy
	$599.99 CAD	$598.43 CAD	$599.99 CAD	Buy
	$586.43 CAD	$584.43 CAD	$588.43 CAD	Buy
	£552.69	£553.98	£573.90	Buy
	$399.99 USD	$399.99 USD	$379.65 USD	Buy
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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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Safety first! A battery warning sticker dominates the front of the box, along with a few of the key features.

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The rear of the box showcases all the board's features, along with a comprehensive specification rundown and a view of the rear I/O. It also gives you a glimpse of the Xpander card. More on that shortly.

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The X870I Edge Ti Evo includes a comprehensive set of accessories. There's a WiFi antenna, a pair of SATA cables, RGB cables, quick-installation information, regulatory information, and some stickers. MSI also includes a flash drive with utilities and drivers. That's a rarity these days and usually exclusive to high-end boards.

Several recent MSI boards include a header that combines a USB 2.0 header, an ARGB header, and a fan header into a single cable. MSI calls it EZ-Conn, and it's a nice little way to avoid some of the cable spaghetti that's usually inevitable when putting together an SFF system. There's also a front panel connector extension cable. It is very handy indeed, as accessing the header on the motherboard is pretty much impossible once you have a graphics card installed.

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The Xpander card is a 5-in-1 daughter board that connects to a dedicated slot adjacent to the memory slots. On it, you'll find two SATA ports, an M.2 slot, a USB 20Gbps Type-C header with 27W power delivery, and a Type-C USB 5Gbps header that connects to a case with an adapter cable.

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The M.2 slot supports PCIe 4.0 x4. It doesn't include a heatsink, and as the drive will be sandwiched up against the adjacent memory, it is best suited to a drive with low thermal requirements.

Motherboard Overview

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The board features an attractive silvery-grey color scheme. The CPU socket area is quite spacious for an ITX board, thanks to its low-profile heatsink section. The board lacks built-in RGB, but you do get a single ARGB header, plus a second one via the EZ-Conn cable. Using the same cable, the board provides up to four fan headers (three on the PCB plus one) and four USB 2.0 ports (one header on the PCB plus two).

When the Xpander card is added, you gain the aforementioned pair of USB 5Gbps ports and a single 20Gbps Type-C port. In terms of internal I/O, the X870I Edge Ti Evo is very well equipped for an ITX board.

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The rear of the board is a darker grey, and the second M.2 slot can be found here.

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As with nearly every Mini-ITX motherboard, the X870I Edge Ti Evo features two RAM slots supporting up to 128GB of memory. Boards with two RAM slots generally feature superior memory overclocking capabilities thanks to their shorter trace lengths. This allowed MSI to claim support of a whopping DDR5-10000 when used with a Ryzen 8000 series processor, with up to DDR5-8400 supported when paired with a Ryzen 9000 processor.

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Most Mini-ITX boards support two M.2 SSDs due to PCB space limitations. The X870I Edge Ti Evo supports three, thanks to the additional one on the Xpander card. The primary slot supports PCIe 5.0. It's contained on a small daughter board that also houses ARGB and USB 2.0 headers. The Xpander card's M.2 slot supports PCIe 4.0 x4, as does the rear slot on the board itself.

MSI points out that the 2nd and 3rd slots support single-sided drives only. This is surely to manage cooling as both slots lack underside cooling. Two SATA ports join the two M.2 slots.

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The primary heatsink is large and features a quick-release mechanism. I do wish MSI had added some grooves to increase surface area, as the temperatures with our Teamgroup SSD were a few degrees higher than we've seen on some ATX boards with smaller heatsinks. At least MSI didn't resort to including a fan as it did with the B850I Edge Ti.

The single reinforced PCIe slot supports PCIe 5.0 x16 cards. With just one PCIe slot and three M.2 slots, there are no lane sharing compromises.

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It's just not possible to pack a high-end VRM subsystem onto the confines of a Mini-ITX PCB, but an 8+2+1 design with 110A stages is easily enough to power the likes of a Ryzen 9 9950X. You wouldn't want to push it too hard, as the VRM heatsink lacks the surface area of most dual-bank ATX designs, so the VRM can get on the warm side. A small secondary heatsink on the rear of the board assists with cooling.

This isn't a board you'd use to manually overclock a high core count CPU, though, but stock chips with or without PBO won't cause any problems as long as there is sufficient case airflow, which is particularly important in a cramped Mini-ITX case.

There is a small embedded fan, but I did not notice it over the sound of our adjacent 360mm AIO cooler. It almost seems ineffectual, actually. It may ramp up in a cramped case, but it is controllable via the BIOS.

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The rear I/O is pretty good for an ITX board. The USB complement consists of eight ports. USB4 with DP support is expected. You also get another Type-C 10Gbps port and five Type-A 10Gbps ports. With a front 20Gbps port with 27W PD, two USB 5Gbps ports, and two USB 2.0 ports, the board supports up to 13 USB devices.

The networking complement consists of a 5G Realtek RTL8126 controller, while a MediaTek MT7927 WiFi 7 controller supports 320MHz connections, delivering up to 5.8Gbps of bandwidth.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports, as well as S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC4080 codec drives these.

Finally, we have an HDMI 2.1 port, a CMOS clear button, and a BIOS flashback button.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

With its 800 series motherboards, MSI introduced a new UEFI design, and it's a welcome upgrade. It combines the simplicity of old-school BIOS layouts with a fresh design that's easy on the eye, with attractive fonts and contrast. The hardware monitoring page, in particular, is very well designed.

You'll want to visit the hardware monitoring page to adjust the VRM embedded fan settings. It can get quite loud when it spins up above the 40-50% range, but setting it below that will provide a good balance between noise and temperature moderation.

MSI calls its motherboard software the MSI Center. I really like the way it lets you download modules instead of a whole suite of bloat you may never use. The Mystic Light RGB control and hardware monitoring apps are likely downloads, but there's also a bunch of AI-assisted modules for tasks such as diagnostics and performance, audio, and networking.

Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench 2024 is a reliable, widely used benchmark that measures both single and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates.

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The X870I Edge Ti Evo performed bang on where you'd expect it to, achieving 2,282 in the nT test and 138 in the 1T test. That's expected from our test configuration with small variances either way.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user might consider a high-core-count CPU, such as the Ryzen 9 9950X. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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A result of 435 seconds is slightly behind the leaders here, though a handful of seconds over a seven-minute test is not worrisome.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher value indicates the task will take less time to complete.

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A result of 159.3 FPS is just over one FPS below the top result. Nothing to speak of, really

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's very sensitive to changes in memory speed and latency, and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A score of 231.79 BIPS is a strong result for the X870I Edge Ti Evo.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has been an area where Intel traditionally held an advantage. Chiplet architectures inevitably add some latency compared to monolithic chips. The real-world benefits aren't that important, though.

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70.6 ns is another good result.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs solely for leisure, but some of us have to work too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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13,429 is a mid-pack result. I had to run it a second time, though, as the first run was in the 11,000's. Definitely a glitch.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game.

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The X870I Edge Ti Evo cracks the 4000 mark, but is a fraction behind the leaders.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme has lost favor as a graphics benchmark to Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The differences between the boards are minor, with only a few hundred points separating them when measured by CPU score.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences, though less so with our RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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It's no surprise that the motherboard makes little difference in graphically limited scenarios. Though the X870I Edge Ti Evo did record a strong minimum FPS result.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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The X870I Edge Ti Evo is not lacking on the gaming front, although the margins are very small.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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Just four frames per second cover the entire field in this test.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. Each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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This result shows how ITX boards are compromised by their small size. A result of 72 degrees is easily the highest among the boards here, even with a small fan included. It goes without saying that good airflow is a must if you plan to run a high-core-count CPU under load for extended periods.

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The X870I Edge Ti Evo's primary M.2 heatsink has a lot of surface area, but it is more like a block. MSI could incorporate grooves to improve heat dissipation.

Final Thoughts

I'm unashamedly a lover of small form factor systems. Even though there are inherent compromises with such systems, a user with a single GPU and an SSD or two will not lack for anything. The MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi is a compelling option for those looking to build a mini-PC with a solid feature set that ticks most of the important boxes.

At $429, it is priced on the high side, but there are some reasons for the extra money. The ability to install three M.2 SSDs is a real bonus, while the likes of USB4, 27W USB PD, 320MHz WiFi, and 5G LAN are justifications over cheaper boards. The ASUS ROG Strix X870-I Gaming WiFi is MSI's nearest competitor, but it's black, which might be the main differentiator for many. It also lacks the third M.2 slot, though it does include the interesting ROG Hive external sound device. I have not reviewed the ASUS, but on specs alone, it looks like a good competitor.

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The VRM is sufficient to power a 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X, but given its small heatsink area relative to ATX boards, a CPU with a lower core count would be a more recommended pairing. I would opt for something like a 9800X3D. That would make for a powerful little gaming system. If you do use a high-core-count CPU, you'll likely have to tweak the tiny embedded fan. It is silent by default, making it somewhat superfluous. In the cramped confines of a case, I'd add some more RPM unless your case has decent airflow.

MSI adds a customizable software bundle, while its UEFI layout is easy on the eye and offers simple navigation. The fan control page in particular deserves praise.

The MSI MPG X870I Edge Ti Evo WiFi is a strong, yet expensive contender for the best Mini-ITX offering for the AMD platform. It's just a question of how much weight you put on various features. If you can plan around some thermal compromises, it's a solid offering that will happily sit at the heart of your Mini-ITX build.