MSI B850M MORTAR WIFI Motherboard Review

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Spencer_E

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Introduction Today, we have the MSI MAG B850M MORTAR WIFI, one of MSI’s latest M-ATX form factor motherboards. As a reminder, the MAG line-up from MSI is the lowest level of their three main tiers (MEG, MPG, and MAG) of products, and as it is designed to be the go-to for the no-frills gamer at […]

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Pretty sure this was my 2nd choice when I was looking for a B850M board. I can't remember for sure, but at the time, there was an MSI board that was only available overseas, and this looks a lot like it and if I remember correctly, that board only just recently became available in North America. The main deal breaker I had with this board, and it shouldn't stop anyone else unless they have similar concerns, is that I didn't like the idea of having my drives underneath the GPU. Between the heat of a 5090 and whatever gets produced for a gen5 NVMe, I had my concerns about the two adding heat to each other.

I also found it interesting about the 12+2+1 configuration, but at 60a per stage. One of the more unique configurations I came across when researching smaller boards.

Otherwise, for users who don't have extreme needs, it looks like a nice board. Plenty of fan headers, 2 drives, lots of ports, and a good selection at that and okay price given what AM5 micro boards go for on average. Generally speaking, I usually prefer MSI boards as I've had some pretty good experiences with them in my AMD builds (except for some odd BT/WiFi driver issues here and there).
 
MSIs B850 MPower would be my vote, but I've seen rumors that it will only be available in Asia:

www.techpowerup.com

MSI Prepares OC-Focused B850E MPOWER Motherboard, and X870 ITX Board with PCB I/O Extension

MSI's Computex booth has prepared new products for everyone, even for overclockers in microATX form factors. The company has presented a microATX MPOWER B850E motherboard, as we expected the MPOWER series comeback, with a very simple visual layout, aiming to please overclockers and even extreme...
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com

(also, the Mortar looks good, thanks Spencer for the review!
 
Hate to nick pick. Looks like auto correct took a type for Muted and turned it into the word smutted. While it is a word... I don't think it's the word you intended. I hate when Autocorrect does crap like that to me. It's in the first page.
 
Ok what kit is that... i don't NEED 256 gigs of ram... but just dont need 16 cores or a 4tb pcie5 nvme either.
 
Grimlakin said:
Ok what kit is that... i don't NEED 256 gigs of ram... but just dont need 16 cores or a 4tb pcie5 nvme either.
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I don't think you're gonna like the price. It's not a single kit, the only single 4x64GB kits you can get are G.Skill 6000C32/34/36 using Samsung M-die, and I really don't care to bother with any DDR5 except Hynix.

It's two of these kits: https://www.newegg.com/p/0RN-00MB-000S4

Although I paid the extra $10 each for the kits that include dummy RGB DIMMs because the standalone kits ship from Taiwan and I didn't want to risk customs or tariff issues on the purchase - https://www.newegg.com/p/0RN-00MB-000S5

It's currently the only way to get high binned Hynix 32Gbit M-die.

I just stuck each matched pair to a channel so they would have (hypothetically) better matching for training.

I honestly didn't expect it to even POST at EXPO 6400, I figured I would have to run them at 6000C30/32, if even that. A very pleasant surprise that it.. did post and has been running without issues so far. I have a big pile of testing to do to validate that its actually stable. It takes... a long time to test that much ram on a dual channel platform.
 
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Ouch... yeds thatg price is painful. I tgnj know I'll stray with my 64 gig for now. 1k for 256 gig of ram... wow.. pioneers like you bring the price down for tje rest of us. :)
 
Grimlakin said:
Ouch... yeds thatg price is painful. I tgnj know I'll stray with my 64 gig for now. 1k for 256 gig of ram... wow.. pioneers like you bring the price down for tje rest of us. :)
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Bro, you day drinking? :p
Hail the Brain Slug said:
It's two of these kits: https://www.newegg.com/p/0RN-00MB-000S4

Although I paid the extra $10 each for the kits that include dummy RGB DIMMs because the standalone kits ship from Taiwan and I didn't want to risk customs or tariff issues on the purchase - https://www.newegg.com/p/0RN-00MB-000S5
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I LOL'd that the link has porn in it. For indeed it is hardware pr0n.

You are a serious hotrodder Brain.
 
DAPUNISHER said:
You are a serious hotrodder Brain.
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This is true, but my intention is to save money this way, believe it or not.

The alternative for my workstation build was a threadripper 9960X, and while that would be faster in some ways and provide ECC, it would have cost over $2000 more for this build in addition to requiring a significantly larger chassis.

It's still disappointing there's no platform/products targeted toward people who need more cores and ram but don't need 80+ PCI-e lanes and a gigantic doublewide EEEE-ATX motherboard with 19 slots.

I can't wait to see what kind of performance we get in Zen 6 on AM5 with the new 12 core CCD providing 24 cores. I hope they improve the CCD interconnect so the CPU isn't so bandwidth-bottlenecked.
 
Hail the Brain Slug said:
Working through the extremely slow testing and validation necessary for that much RAM.
View attachment 3817
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For those wondering what the caveats are to using 4x64GB and pushing it to 6400C32, the answer is average access latency:

1755431644970.png

tRFC and tREFI are what control average access latency for DDR5 (especially on AMD). tREFI will also affect bandwidth, and it's a setting that is 'fastest' when set very high - it maxes out at 65535 on AM5 CPUs. Since it controls how often the data must be refreshes in RAM, and these refreshes block the memory from usage by the system, and relatively low tREFI is going to increase average access latency and decrease bandwidth somewhat.

These two settings generally have to be loosened when using sane voltage (<1.45v) and sane cooling (not watercooling the memory), otherwise memory instability will bring down the system with BSODs and data corruption!
 
LazyGamer said:
For those wondering what the caveats are to using 4x64GB and pushing it to 6400C32, the answer is average access latency:

View attachment 3821

tRFC and tREFI are what control average access latency for DDR5 (especially on AMD). tREFI will also affect bandwidth, and it's a setting that is 'fastest' when set very high - it maxes out at 65535 on AM5 CPUs. Since it controls how often the data must be refreshes in RAM, and these refreshes block the memory from usage by the system, and relatively low tREFI is going to increase average access latency and decrease bandwidth somewhat.

These two settings generally have to be loosened when using sane voltage (<1.45v) and sane cooling (not watercooling the memory), otherwise memory instability will bring down the system with BSODs and data corruption!
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These values are pretty standard for auto timings, but in this config I have made an effort to tighten up tRFC and loosen tREFI, but doing either by any meaningful amount causes it to intermittently fail to train.

I could spend time trying to find whatever very small amount I can tweak them while still functioning and training normally, but I do not believe whatever miniscule gain is left to be worth eroding the margin of stability in this config, given you don't install this much ram for fun or to play games.

It needs to turn on reliably every day.
 
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Hail the Brain Slug said:
It needs to turn on reliably every day.
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Exactly.

The issue you most likely run into is heat vs. voltage, assuming that the memory controller isn't crapping out, and at 6400 it almost certainly is close.

I get the same with my dual-rank 2gb M-die (first-gen Hynix DDR5) in 2x32GB; any 'faster' settings or higher voltage and tests start failing, though obviously it has a bit more flexibility than 4x64GB, in comparison:

1755462138858.png


(note that this kit was an XMP-only 5600C40 pair from Kingston; I'm betting that the heatspreaders are more like heat insulators, and I'm running a tower cooler that occludes airflow as well - so they heat up fast even at 1.32v, but at the same time, they're stable and definitely not the limiting factor for this system so I'm leaving them alone for now!)
 
Space_Ranger said:
Hey LG: How are you liking the ASROCK X870E Nova motherboard?
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Not much to dislike so long as it doesn't fry this 9800X3D (which is stock aside from RAM tuning and on BIOS 3.30).

I like that I can have 4x4.0 lane M.2 drives and one 2x3.0 lane slot occupied without affecting the main PCIe slot, which stays at 16x. It's an enthusiast-class board with power/restart buttons and BIOS code display and is build well.

Minor complaints include the screwed-on M.2 slot covers below the main PCIe slot and that the RGB LEDs on the right edge of the board (right side of the chipset) are undiffused and pretty bright, so I leave those off. Board works with stuff like SignalRGB and OpenRGB, I use the latter.

Also could include 10Gbit, but it has 5Gbit and most folks probably don't need more than 1Gbit or the built-in WiFi, which I'm happy to report works very well! But do note that Microsoft isn't shipping the drivers for these NICs in Windows yet, so you'll need to make arrangements. As I moved my drives over, I wound up using an old USB NIC to get online and signed in.
 
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