MSI X370 Krait Gaming Motherboard Review

In this review we looked at the MSI X370 Krait Gaming motherboard.  Honestly I went into this review with high hopes that I might find a hidden gem in the gaming motherboard world.  On the surface the Krait Gaming series looks amazing.  The board features bold white graphics which have been applied to everything including the heatsinks, I/O covers, expansion slots and even the PCB.  The last time I remember seeing this was back in the Pentium 4 days at the height of the custom PCB color wars.

Honestly I’m glad that bold graphics are making a come-back even if they are 100% covered once you get all of your gear installed.  For a gaming motherboard the MSI X370 Krait Gaming doesn’t disappoint but doesn’t really impress either.  You will get a Gigabit Ethernet controller, provided by Realtek, you’ll get a high-quality audio controller backed by a Nahemic 2 audio processor with high end components and Audio Boost technology and yet no optical output or gold connectors.  You also get a 10 phase VRM and yet somehow the motherboard didn’t want to overclock.

In most every motherboard review I include a dedicated section to overclocking.  In that section I compare base performance against a stable overclock to see just how much more performance you can get.  With most motherboards this section is rather straight forward given that CPUs “should” be the wildcard, NOT the motherboard.  With Ryzen this is just the opposite and wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t get the X370 Krait Gaming to overclock using my benchmark configuration.  The best I could get was 3.7Ghz which did show a gain in performance but only because every core was running 3.7Ghz instead of the first couple.  I decided to leave the Overclocking section out of this review because, frankly, overclocking to the boost frequency isn’t really an overclock.

There wasn’t anything physically wrong with the X370 Krait Gaming and if you look at it from a segmentation standpoint the lack of overclocking support isn’t that big of deal.  The board is priced to move and as a result you have to forgo a new comfort features.  For instance, no gold on the audio connections, no High-Bandwidth SLI bridge and limited overclocking support.  While all of that would have been nice to have that is what you get at the lower end of the price spectrum. 

Overall there isn’t anything wrong with the X370 Krait Gaming that can’t be fixed with a BIOS update and even without it you’ll get some amazing performance.  In our benchmarks you’ll see that Ryzen is damn consistent meaning that you aren’t leaving anything on the table in terms of performance regardless of what you are doing.

Oh ya, you even get VR support and Mystic Light SYNC.

Bold Black and White Graphics
Krait Sounds Badass
Excellent UEFI Menus
Clean Audio
Mystic Light Sync

Board had issues overclocking past turbo speed
UEFI needs some color