The MSI B350M Gaming Pro Review: Micro Size, Micro Price

Conclusions

The intended audience for the  MSI B350M Gaming Pro is a world of gamers on a budget, who are looking for a no frills mATX offering as a smaller alternative to a full-sized system. While there are enough core features and elements to put this board into the gamer friendly category, it has to be remembered that this is an entry level B350 chipset offering. While comparisons will be made in the performance figures against much more expensive boards, premium controllers simply cost more. That being said, the B350M Gaming Pro is compatible with the Ryzen 5 2400G ($169) and Ryzen 3 2200G ($99) so pairing up with some DDR4-2666 with this board could be a budget gamers delight.

As would be expected with a lower cost option, the B350M Gaming Pro puts in a decent showing in relation to the price and in certain aspects such as idle power consumption. The most negative element to the performance testing came in the gaming, where the board managed to perform over a frame lower than the ASRock X370 Pro Gaming in Rise of the Tomb Raider. A single frame isn’t likely to hinder the gaming experience too much, and the performance overall isn’t of any concern especially considering what’s on offer for the asking price of $80. Where the board truly lags behind the rest of the pack in relation to the AM4 boards on test is the audio - the B350M Gaming Pro scored the lowest dBA in our Rightmark Audio Analyzer Dynamic range testing. This is due to the board being equipped with a lower grade and more budget focused Realtek ALC887 which was implemented on a lot mid-range Z170 motherboards, and that was around 3 years ago now. That being said, the performance isn’t far off the Realtek ALC892 codec and given the $80 price tag and mATX form factor, this can be pardoned.

The board has four SATA 6 Gbps ports available with the option to use RAID 0/1 and 10 arrays. The layout of the ports consists of two separate pairings, two right angled connectors and two straight angled connectors which MSI has impleemented to shave as much off the manufacturing costs as possible. There is also a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot with support for drives with a size no greater than M.2 2280 - this slot is also compatible with SATA based M.2 drives and the slot doesn’t share bandwidth with any other slot. The full length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot has an added layer of physical protection due to MSI's Steel Armor coating and the board also has a further two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots which can be used for compatible expansion cards to enhance the networking, or even install a dedicated sound card.

For the memory, MSI has gone with two RAM slots rather than four which isn’t due to a size limitation, but more one of shaving expense once again. This means the B350M Gaming Pro has a support for a maximum capacity of 32 GB of DDR4 memory, with supported speeds of up to DDR4-3200. Users looking for an option with four slots would need to look at boards such as MSIs own B350M Bazooka ($89).

The B350M Gaming Pro ($80) doesn’t quite offer the value I would expect for a board targeted towards gamers, and the disregard to bundle any form of audio software is a downside. With the budget gaming marketing being dominated by the Ryzen based APUs, these are fully supported as MSI has implemented HDMI 1.4, DVI-D and VGA ports on this board. Another questionable element is MSIs insistence on using the same MOSFETs on their bottom end boards, as they do on the top end models such as the X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium. This can be construed as a plus or negative, but in this case it’s a positive as the NIKOS PK616BA MOSFETs and PK632 are combined with the Richtek RT8894A PWM controlled 3+2 power delivery. While the B350 chipset does support overclocking, MSI has put a limit on the CPU and RAM core voltages to 1.4 V and 1.5 V respectively, with these limits being to protect the components on the board. Despite this, we still managed 3.9 GHz all-core in our testing.

With respectable performance which is consistent and expected from a board of this pedigree, the B350M Gaming Pro gives basic and budget friendly features for gamers, with everything rolled into the smaller mATX form factor. The price difference between this and the B350 Tomahawk being is so little, the beefier power delivery, the USB Type-C connectivity and better onboard audio (Realtek ALC892) offered on the Tomahawk make it a more worthwhile purchase in the long term; the main pitfall over the Tomahawk would be one fewer USB Type-A connection on the rear panel which given the variance between both these sub $90 models, gives the Tomahawk the primarily advantage. The B350M Tomahawk has four available RAM slots with the same DDR4-3200 support as the B350M Gaming Pro, making it the better purchase if it is available in your region.