MSI MAG B850 Edge Ti WiFi Motherboard Review

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  While the gameplay and weapons are similar to the UT2004 counterpart, the gaming engine is all new.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  The resolution was set to 800x600 to minimize any performance gains from the video card.

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities.  Previous versions of this benchmark are used to collect HWBOT points and it has been a common entry into the competitive benchmarking lineup.  This is benchmark is purely CPU based with very little impact related to GPU selection or memory type and one of the best benchmarks for testing multi core processors.

The latest generation of the premier PC performance metric featuring new Office Applications, General Productivity, Photo Editing, and Advanced Content Creation.  The Office Application scenario features updated workloads for popular office suite-style applications. The General Productivity scenario features tasks like web browsing, file compression, and application installation. The new Photo Editing scenarios measure the responsiveness of creative photo management and manipulation usage models. The Advanced Content Creation scenario heavily uses photo and video editing applications, including multitasking.

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

Our real world benchmarks are designed to illustrate a cross section in performance that covers gaming, video encoding, content creation and everyday office applications. 

Some people wonder why the AMD Ryzen is gaining in popularity and this short list of benchmark results tells most of the tale, especially when you compare the B850 against the Z890.  In some benchmarks the results were night and day while some of the day to day workloads are pretty much the same.

One issue I did run into was the lack of “real” overclocking support on the B850, which is quite common for mainstream AMD chipsets to remove this feature I am humbled to see that there are overclocking controls available on the MSI MAG B850 Edge.  They just don’t do much, at least with a 9000 series CPU.  For instance, there is a gamer mode that will disable half the processor and turn off SMT, ideally to provide better compatibility with older games but, in doing so it doesn’t increase overclocking headroom and lowers overall performance.

Likewise, you can do software overclocking using Ryzen Master but the overall gains are not worth the trouble in my opinion.  From what I can tell, the MAG B850 Edge is tuned extremely well from the factory and anything I did to change that resulted in a net negative across the board.

It should be noted that DirectX 11/12+ is not represented in our motherboard reviews because the results are almost purely based on the video card selected and very little to do with motherboard performance.  Likewise, the benchmarks we have chosen respond well to minor changes in memory bandwidth and how efficient the system configuration is overall.  

Finally, we test our systems we do so with the default and auto assigned settings in place so to represent un-turned and out of box performance.  (read: default user setups).  Your performance may vary depending on the time you spent tuning your hardware.