With the Coffee Lake launch, last fall Intel also launched their new Z370 chipset. Like in the past the Z370 chipset is Intel’s flagship platform, but unlike in the past, they didn’t also launch it with other mid-range and budget chipsets. In fact, it wasn’t until this week that the others were available. That’s a long wait for those of you who want something cheaper or just have no need for some of the Z370 overclocking features. So Tuesday the H370, H310, and B360 chipsets launched and the first one to come through the LanOC office is the MSI B360 Gaming Plus. Today I’m going to check it out and see how it compares to the Z370’s we have taken a look at before. I’m especially curious to see if this might be the sweet spot for budget builds right now to help save money to pay for the expensive video cards and memory that you are going to need.  

Product Name: MSI B360 Gaming Plus

Review Sample Provided by: MSI

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

specifications

 


New Chipsets

So what is a B360? Well, you might actually be a little confused thinking this was the B350 AM4 chipset. In fact, there is a good chance I mess up while writing this and mix the two up at least once. Well B360 is one of Intel’s newly announced chipsets to complement Z370 that was launched last fall. Normally they launch them all together so this is a little unusual. But we now finally have lower budget options available. They launched the H370, H310, Q370, and the B360. Each has a few different features depending on what you plan on using them for. So H370 gets you u to 30 high-speed lanes and 20 PCIe lanes and has the highest number of USB ports. It also has support for 2 M.2’s. B370 is similar as well but more business focused with 30 I/O lanes, 224 PCIe, and 3 M.2s. B360 is the next closest with 24 I/O lanes but with only 12 max PCIe lanes and just one M.2. Then H310 is the budget board with just 14 I/O lanes, just 6 PCIe lanes and those can only be Gen 2 and zero M.2 ports.

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All of the chipsets support integrated Wireless AC and with the exception of H310 things like Optane and Intel Smart sound are also supported. The only reason for so many chipsets is because a few of these are business focused, specifically the Q370 so you won’t see as many of those on the regular market. Its clear that even beyond PCIe lanes the lower I/O bandwidth can make a performance difference when dropping down to stuff like the H310 so keep that in mind before you plan on just getting the cheapest board available.

I can’t forget the new CPUs launched as well. Along with a long list of mobile CPUs Intel also slipped in a few more Coffee Lake CPUs for the desktop market. Only three were standard power options, now you have two more i5 models with the 8600 and the 8500 then another i3 with the 8300. It's easy to see how these fit into the current lineup, the 8400 fits right between the i3-8300 and the i5-8500. Both new i5’s are just above and below $200 and both have over 4GHz turbo clock speeds and 6 cores with no hyperthreading. The 8300 is a 4 core as well, just like the 8400, this might be a great CPU at a price point of $138.

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Packaging and Accessories

It’s a gaming branded motherboard and the box is red and black, I’m sure most of you are shocked. The B360 Gaming Plus branding is in the middle as well as “Intel Motherboard”. I thought this was odd but realized that the whole B350 AM4 based boards for Ryzen may be close enough that they wanted to give some extra distinction. Up in the top left corner is the MSI logo with their gaming dragon logo. In the top right are the Intel badges that show the chipset, CPU supported, and Optane is supported. Then along the bottom, MSI also included their RGB lighting logo and performance gaming in the other corner because gaming needed to be on here twice.

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The back of the box actually has a picture of the board, I would argue that this would be nice to have on the front of the box as well. The photo has a few of the boards features highlighted with lines and then next to it there are smaller photos showing other board features. Down on the bottom are a basic specification listing and a line drawing of the rear I/O panel so you know exactly what to expect for connections.

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Inside the board comes wrapped up in a static bag and then it sits on top of a cardboard tray. All of the documentation and accessories are stored up under it. For documentation, you get a quick installation guide, a warranty registration card, a full user guide, and then a paper about case standoffs. This shows three areas that sometimes use standoffs that this board doesn’t use and warns to make sure you don’t have them because it will create a short. You also get a metal gaming dragon logo case badge.

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There is, of course, a driver disc and you also get SATA cables. Oddly enough where you would normally see at least 4 with an ATX board you only get two here. There is also a small bag with the M.2 screw inside. Then MSI also included a rear I/O shield. The outside has a black sticker with red legends. The back has all of the old school metal springs so be careful when installing this, they can cut you up and more importantly they also like to get inside of USB ports and short things out if you don’t install the board correctly.

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Board Layout and Pictures

Well, I hope you like red and black because that’s what you get with the B360 Gaming Plus. This board is a little old school with the traditional gaming colors. That said this has been one of the most popular color combinations for a long time, only recently when RGB has become popular have the color neutral layouts taken off. Anyhow the B360 Gaming Plus is a full ATX board with a standard layout. That means four DDR4 DIMMs over on the right, a center-mounted LGA socket with heatsinks above and to the left of it, a chipset cooler to the right of the PCIe slots. The Chipset cooler is a little higher than normal though. The ATX form factor also means there aren’t any weird layout issues with power and other connections as well.

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Okay for cooling, like I mentioned the B360 Gaming Plus has two heatsinks around the CPU socket. Neither of them are huge and they don’t have an overly intricate design but they are aluminum and they look to be painted or powder coated with a rough flat black finish with the randomly like red trim across the top. Then you have the chipset cooler down to the right of the PCIe slots. This one has that same textured flat black finish. The red lines here go with the angle of the heatsink and then it has the MSI logo on it as well. The cooler is a diamond shape but then it is sitting at around a 30-degree angle. Because of this the cooler actually covers a lot of space, you can see it up in between the two x16 slots and almost to the edge of the board as well.

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Starting up in the top left corner of the B360 Gaming Plus the CPU socket and the heatsinks and power circuitry that go with it take up a majority of the space here. The rear I/O doesn’t take up as much space ironically without having a big cover on it. But down below the left heatsink, there is a four pin PWM fan header for a case fan and next to it is a 6 pin PCI power connection. It's actually really weird to see an extra power connector here or on a board of this level in general. You only normally see them on the highest end boards. There is also an 8 pin CPU power up top. Normally this would also include a CPU fan header but its not on this side, you can see it over on the right of the top heatsink next to the memory.

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In the top right portion of the B360 Gaming Plus, there is a lot more going on. The four red and black DDR4 DIMMs take up most of the space here but MSI packed in a lot along the side of them. In addition to the two fan headers we already found, there are three more up in the corner. Two are for system fans and the third is for a pump. MSI has the pump header setup to handle up to 2 amps, this is good but a little lower than what some other boards have now (3 or more). Below the fan headers, there is a small array of four LEDs that MSI is calling their EZ Debug LED. Like on other boards, these are labeled for Boot, VGA, RAM, and CPU and they will light up once each of those has happened in the boot process. So basically you will be able to see where the problem is if you don’t boot. Below that is the 24-pin motherboard power. MSI has the DIMM label right here as well and you can see that the two red DIMMs have priority if you are only using two sticks of memory. Last but not least is the USB 3.1 header just below the motherboard power.

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Down in the bottom right corner, there is a LOT going on. It starts with the four right-angled SATA ports that are tucked in right under the chipset cooler. What stood out to me here though was the pad and outline for a right-angled USB 3.1 header that just isn’t here at all. There is a fifth SATA jack that faces up as well just in case you don’t have clearance for the right-angled plugs you at least have something that will work. Then down along the bottom edge is packed with headers. On the far right is the front panel connection. The label is next to it but it follows the same layout you see on all boards anymore. Next to that is the front panel speaker. Above those the TBT1 connector is a thunderbolt add in card connection. The JSPI1 connection next to that is just for reprograming the EPROM do you don’t need to worry about it. Then there are two USB 2.0 headers and the last one over on the left is our 6th PWM fan header.

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Our last corner, the bottom left corner has the most going on so I have to break things down a little. The onboard sound and PCIe slots take up most of the space so I will get to those in just a second. But down along the bottom, there are a few different headers to look at. There is one more PWM header for a total of 7. The JLPT1 port, aka the really wide one, is a parallel port connection, you don’t see these very often anymore. The JCOM1 port next to it is also a rare serial communications port as well. What got me though was the tiny 4 pin header with no label, this is actually the RGB header that uses MSI’s MYSTIC LIGHT and Sync software, you would think it would be red in color or something to help it stand out. On the far left is the front panel audio header, you can see it is right on the split PCB line. Up above that, the JTPM1 labeled header is a trusted platform header. Overall a lot of these connections are business focused but even though this is branded as a gaming board the B360 chipset as a whole is labeled as business or consumer from Intel, I’m just surprised a lot of these headers were still included.

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As for the audio chipset, as I mentioned and as you can see MSI did split this from the normal PCB using a resin line to help prevent interference. They also have left and right channels split into different layers as well.  You get a dual Realtek ALC892 Codec setup with 7.1 audio channels. You do get quality caps but there aren’t very many and the four that are there are all around the “audio boost” audio processor.

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For connections, we have three types here. Up top, there is a single M.2 x4 slot that supports 2242/ 2260 /2280/ 22110 lengths of M.2 devices. Below that then there is an x16 slot, two x1 slots, another x16 length slot, and two more x1. In total, you get two x16 PCIe and four x1 PCIe. Obviously, all of the x1 slots have the x1 bandwidth and they are all PCIe 3.0. The top x16 PCIe slot is always x16 as well and the bottom runs at x4 when the top slot is in use. If you look close you can even see that the bottom one only has pins to the x4 length. The x16 PCIe slot also has a metal shield to give a little additional strength.

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The rear I/O on the B360 Gaming Plus has a lot of free space. You do get both DVI and DisplayPort connections for those who need onboard video, but the large amount of space above those two makes it feel like you are missing things. The 6 port audio connections over on the right aren’t missing anything other than an optical connection but I don’t think very many people use optical connections when it's not an HTPC. Those that do for their desktop audio will have to go with a DAC though. There are two USB 2.0 ports on the far left along with a PS/2 connection for your old Model M keyboard. There are two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports in red below the Intel I219-V Gigabit Ethernet port. Those red USB ports can be a little confusing with the other red port that has a Type-C below it. That is because the Type-C and red port above it are both faster USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports. It has a slightly darker color and the legends on the I/O shield will tell you, but I prefer to be able to spot with colors, especially in the dark.

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As always taking a look at the back of the board gives us a better look at that black PCB. I think I prefer the all-black look of the back than the black with red stripes all over it of the top, but that’s just me. I like that MSI did put a line around the CPU to make sure you don’t run any wires there before installed your cooler bracket. Beyond that, the big thing going on back here are those big google map looking pointers. It looks like MSI has had issues with people shorting out boards by forgetting to check standoffs when installing. They have marked all three of the locations that when using mATX standoff locations would touch the back of the board and short things out. Be careful, don’t blow up your PC before you even get to use it!

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BIOS

So as always, one of the big areas that can make or break a motherboard for me is in its software implementation. In the past that used to just be what you installed in windows because everyone had the same basic BIOS. But with UEFI’s most companies have gone out on their own with their own navigation setups, features, and tools. Rather than post up 100 pictures, I did a slow basic walkthrough video of the UEFI on the MSI B360 Gaming Plus. This way I show every single option and page and if you need to you can pause to make sure you have everything you need.

So like a lot of boards, the B360 comes with an EZ Mode UEFI and MSI did a great job by making sure I landed there first. I hate when you start in the advanced mode because inexperienced uses would have to find the EZ mode and are more likely to change things that shouldn’t be changed. So the easy mode has the CPU and motherboard temps up in the corner along with basic information and clock speeds. You can one touch turn on XMP memory speeds and drag and drop boot devices. You can also flip through pages over on the left to see but not be able to change different settings.

Once you switch to the advanced mode (up top if you didn’t see it) you get the traditional layout that MSI has been using for a while now. This has OC profiles over on the right along with the hardware monitor and a board explorer. The board explorer lets you see a photo of your board and mouse over to see where each thing is plugged in at. Up to we have the same one-click XMP, clock speeds, temps, and drag and drop boot options so that is nice. The hardware monitor page on the right opens up to show you all of the RPM readouts and temps. It also lets you change the fan profiles, change the fans between PWM and DC, and set if you want that fan to go off of CPU or system temps.  

When you get into the two main option pages over on the left, the settings page and the OC page MSI has basically split all motherboard options into anything overclocking related and everything else is in the settings menu. Each of these menus looks and feels a lot more like old BIOS navigation. You can still use your mouse but you can also use a keyboard if you want and in some cases, a keyboard to type in clocks or voltages would be quicker than one click at a time.

The settings menu has all of the peripheral and chipset features in it as well as your full system status. If you watch me click through it starting at about 1:20 you will also notice that from time to time when I click the back button it takes me back multiple pages to the main menu and I have to start over. I thought it was a double click issue with my mouse at first but this happened with another mouse as well. I’ve never had the issue before but it seems there is a bug with it. As for the overclocking options, there are a surprising amount of options for this not being a Z series board. In the end, really you are limited by the memory speed cap on B360 but if you want you could overclock the CPU halfway decently.

 


Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

CPU: Intel i7-8700K- Live Pricing

Cooling: Noctua NH-U14S for cooling - Live Pricing

 Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

Memory: HyperX Fury DDR4 2600MHz - Live Pricing

Storage: Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD - Live Pricing

Video Card: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti - Live Pricing

Power Supply: Thermaltake 850w - Live Pricing

Case: Microcool Banchetto 101 Testbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

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Performance

For performance testing, I’ve mentioned it a lot in the past but it’s always good to post up a reminder. The performance between different motherboards really isn’t big unless you have one company overclocking or underclocking the CPU. So most of the testing below is just to keep everyone on the up and up and make sure there aren’t any issues. First though, here are our CPUz readouts so that everyone can see our exact configuration and BIOS revision.

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Sadly I had driver issues prior to the Intel launch that caused some issues with my testing time frame. I actually had two more Z370 boards I wanted to get done. I finished their testing but didn’t get published. Anyhow the reason for that push is because the Z370 boards tested below were all prior to the creator update and the Intel Spectre patches. So as you can see there are a few differences in performance between these results that aren’t board related. I can confirm though that the B360 Gaming Plus did perform on par with the Z370 boards that I just finished tested on the same patches. The main differences can be found in the three CPU dependent tests 3DMarkss physics score, PCMark, and Passmark Performance Test 9. Funny enough Ghost Recon: Wildlands performance is way up as was Deus Ex. As for network performance, the Intel I219 did well on our new network, I don’t think you are going to have any trouble moving files around the network on this board.

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Overall and Final Verdict

So now that I’ve taken a closer look at the MSI B360 Gaming Plus, tested its performance, and toyed with the UEFI what do I think? Well For starters I was surprised with just how many fan headers MSI included. I’ve built a lot of builds where even with an ATX board I need to dig out a splitter or a powered adapter but I don’t see that being needed for this board. On top of that, you also get a 2 amp pump header as well for water cooling. Just about everything you need is there for connections short of the new USB 3.1 gen 2 internal connection. You even have Serial and Parallel connections as well, not that I think many people will need them. The performance in my testing was solid even if I didn’t have new numbers that I could show yet post Spectre bug for the Z370 boards. I also dig that this board has two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports including one Type-C, a lot of the budget focused boards seem to skimp on them.

As for things I would change, I wish I could say the Gaming Plus was perfect but I ran into a few things. The most obvious visual one was just how much red there was. I like the red and black look but I miss the all black boards with just red trim. This look is a little too much for me, but if you are looking at this board the red might be okay with you. While I like the 3.1 ports that they included, If I were using this board in a build I would prefer to have at least two more USB connections, USB 2.0 would be fine. I also don’t like that the USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 ports are about the same color on the rear I/O. Beyond that, I was surprised to find the 6-pin PCI power on the board. You only really see that on high-end boards or back when quad video cards would pull too much from the PCIe lanes. I also had an issue with weird double-clicking in the UEFI that would back me all the way out sometimes, I’ve never run into that one before and it wouldn’t stop me from using the Gaming Plus, but it is worth noting.

So is this the board for me? Well, honestly the amount of red would most likely take me out of the running unless I was doing a mostly red build. But feature wise MSI has a good board here. They have the B360 Gaming Arctic as well that is all white with a similar setup if the red doesn’t do it for you. In the end, at $109 this board comes in at the mid-range price wise for B360 and would have been at the bottom end of Z370. It has the features you need, you still have some overclocking, and it's going to save you a little money that will most likely go towards a video card that will translate to actual performance improvements so I think for a lot of people B360 is going to be the way to go. Just make sure its one that fits your color theme.

fv5value

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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