MSI MAG B850 Gaming Plus Max WiFi review

We’re in the middle of AMD’s 800-series chipset lifecycle and several manufacturers including MSI have seen fit for a motherboard refresh. This often includes tweaks to designs to improve performance, include modern features or even add support for new CPUs. The MSI MAG B850 Gaming Plus Max WiFi will retail for around $260, so what do you get for your money?

Its headline features aren’t huge, but could be useful for those that want to maximise their future proofing or have an additional easy way to overclock their system.

Firstly, the BIOS size has increased from 32 MB to 64 MB, which opens the door to housing drivers such as Wi-Fi controllers directly in this storage space, allowing Windows to access your Wi-Fi network during installation. Future features and CPU support are also reasons for a larger BIOS according to MSI.

A base clock generator chip allows for separate adjustment to this frequency so it’s not tied to the rest of the system, providing an additional way to overclock and gain free performance. You can even adjust this on the fly outside of the EFI using two jumpers on the PCB.

MSI has gone all out here with the white theme on this $260 B850 chipset motherboard, even including the PCIe and DIMM slots as well as the CPU cooler mounting brackets and GPU release button mechanism, so if you have a white PC case, it’s already a contender. It’s attractive, uncluttered, but does lack its own RGB lighting, if that’s your thing.

Aside from its minor feature updates that include the 64 MB BIOS as well as separate base clock adjustment and physical jumper buttons to tweak that on the fly, the usual bits are here such as PCIe 5.0 GPU and M.2 SSD support, although cooling for the latter may be an issue due to the tiny heatsink included here, which is also devoid of underside cooling too.

Still, the heatsink and SSD installation across the board in its three M.2 slots are all tool-free so there are no tiny screws to deal with. The first M.2 slot is PCIe 5.0 compatible, the second PCIe 4.0 with four lanes, but the third is PCIe 4.0 with only two lanes, so you’ll likely want to avoid that one unless your SSD specifically meets that slower speed.

The MSI MAG B850 Gaming Plus Max WiFi also has an impressive four PCIe slots, which are made up of the primary PCIe 5.0 slot, a PCIe 4.0 slot with four lanes and two PCIe 3.0 slots with just a single lane each, so there’s no much flexibility here. The slower slots here also share bandwidth with the PCIe 4.0 slot, which gives up two lanes if either of the former are used. Due to the number of slots, the board also has an additional 8-pin PCIe power connector.

Fans and RGB lighting headers are plentiful with seven 4-pin headers for fans, including one using MSIs EZ Conn-header connector and it’s included splitter cable. In total there’s also one 4-pin and four 3-pin and RGB headers. There does seem to be an unusual number of headers on the board in general, but this is partly thanks to a pair of 2-pin headers being added to provide on-the-fly base clock adjustment.

If you like plenty of fast USB ports, unfortunately this is one area that’s left wanting. The Type-C front panel port only offers USB 3.0 speed rather than sprightlier USB 3.2 Gen 2x2’s 20 Gbps. The rear I/O panel has a very mediocre six Type-A ports and four of those are only USB 2.0. This is no worse than this board’s predecessor, but then it currently costs considerably less.

We do get a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps Type-C ports, but it also cuts corners with audio too, only mustering Realtek’s low-end ALC897 codec rather than ALC4080 or ALC1220. The rear I/O panel does at least have buttons for clearing the CMOS and using USB BIOS Flashback and there’s also 5 Gbps Ethernet.

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | RAM: 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2 TB Corsair MP700 | PSU: MSI MAG AB50GL 850 W | OS: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Dell U2415

The VRM and chipset temperatures both remained under 60 °C, which isn’t bad considering they were dealing with some extended high-load tests with hardware such as AMD’s Ryzen 9 9900X and a high-end SSD. There’s certainly scope for pushing the CPU a little further with Precision Boost Overdrive or manual overclocking.

The benchmark scores were on par with more expensive boards too, with the 147 scored in Blender and 1,763 in Cinebench’s multi-thread score closely matching those of the mighty and hideously expensive MEG X870E Godlike X, with the same being true in our game tests. One area it was a little below par was the CPU power, which was on average around 30 W higher in our game tests. This is likely down to the more basic discrete P-PACK power phases used.

The benefits of a 64 MB BIOS are still unclear and likely won’t have an impact immediately. AMD’s next generation of CPUs is already slated to work on 800-series chipset motherboards so these benefits will likely be revealed a little further into the future. The independent base clock overclocking is certainly useful, but most only venture as far as Precision Boost Overdrive features so may have limited appeal. Still, MSI should be applauded for going the extra mile.

The biggest issue, though, is that while it has solid performance and somewhat cool VRMs, it’s just too expensive compared to equivalent options. Even MSI’s own MAG B850 Tomahawk costs less and is better in nearly every way. Unless you must have its new features, then we’d suggest either it or white alternatives such as the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice are much better buys.