Review of MSI B350m Mortar Arctic boot time and overclocking experience.

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IkeaEraser

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Nov 21, 2016
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I need someone to share their experience with MSI's Tomahawk and Mortar experience (I heard it's about the same quality) on the boot time and overclocking experience. I've read of long boot times on reddit and of low overclocking capability (or no State overclock). Would like to verify those facts.

Thanks for the help
 
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ohenryy

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Nov 16, 2014
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Couldn't tell from personal experience but also had seen few comments on the low overclocking.
Its strange because they supposedly have good VRMs. I guess the BIOS is not good enough.
The B350 Fatal1ty its a pretty good alternative.
 
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Timstertimster

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Apr 3, 2013
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I liked the aesthetics of the arctic mortar because my 1060 is white also. And I was encouraged by the heat sinks on the MOSFETs.

Boot time is not good. It takes forever to POST, maybe because it runs a lot of checks.

I updated to the very latest EFI via the convenient m-flash utility. The windows-based control software they give you with it is blah. I'd rather they spend some time designing a nicer BIOS interface and let me control more features like POST error overrides and LED on/off from there.

I'm very seriously considering returning the board, but I'm not sure what to get instead. I need mATX and I'd like MOSFET heat sinks.
 
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anthony.johnson5483

anthony.johnson5483

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Sep 22, 2017
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Strongly recommend against this board.
Awful boot times.
Terrible bios lay out
Cant overclock in bios or some reason (wont let me change the cpu multiplier at all)
leds are less than impressive.
Multiple dead boards sent to me then RMAed
Back plate protrudes out in some spots even when installed correctly
all the softwares the board hypes up blow

on top of all this, it doesnt make a good coaster :/
 
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neiler0847

neiler0847

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Mar 25, 2015
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Now you guys have me worried.

I already have one machine running the ASRock AB350 Pro4. I think it's a fantastic board. I'm building an mATX Ryzen system and would have simply bought the ASRock AB350M Pro4. But I decided to try the Mortar Arctic board over the mATX version of the ASRock board because it had more case fan headers.
 
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Finstar

Finstar

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Sep 7, 2013
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The best way i could describe overclocking on the Tomahawk is that it simply does not. Anything above 3.8GHz is like owning a nice narcoleptic horse, maybe it'll run for a while, maybe the power delivery will just collapse and softlock your pc. Add the fact that it casually seems to forget my oc settings and nearly fried my 1700 when i bought it i'd recommend you stay as far away from it as possible.
Just stick with ASRock.

Can't wait for my x370 Taichi to ship and replace the horrid pile of trash that is the Tomahawk.
 
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farensabri

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Jun 19, 2012
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https://www.kitguru.net/components/motherboard/luke-hill/msi-b350m-mortar-motherboard-review/

This is a review on the Mortar (regular, not the Arctic version). I'm pretty sure apart from the color scheme, the components are exactly the same. 1800X was used and it was able to overclock to 4.0GHz.
 
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IkeaEraser

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Thanks guys for the experiences shared. I think I'll go for RGB with the Gigabyte Aorus X370 Gaming . The savings and whiteness is not worth the trouble, not sure why reviews says otherwise
 
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drea.drechsler

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Oct 16, 2017
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I have the Mortar and I can confirm it's not featured with P-State overclocking as of v1.7 BIOS.

I'm running an 8-core (R7-1700) and I think it's fair enough to say mine over-clocks as well as any other b350 motherboard. Which is to say: you're pushing it really hard at 3.8G. While you might get 4.0G you'll not have any kind of stability even for a short stress run. It should (might?) hold for browsing and light, single threaded, game play though. A 6 or 4 core might fair better.

This is common throughout the B350 platform: all the mfr's have super-skimped on VRM section and, especially, MosFET cooling. It will hold stable even if I didn't but at 3.825G I have to put a fan on the MosFET's during encodes and stress testing or the temp blooms above 100C. That's very common on these boards, all of them.

One really nice thing is the Mortar has 4 fan headers so I put a dedicated VRM fan on one header and set it's profile to only turn on if CPU temp is above 65C with a 5 Second delay. So it only turns on if I'm really stressing the system hard meaning it's totally quiet otherwise.

Otherwise: I can only compare the Mortar to an AB350M Gaming 3 since I have one of them too. They both overclock about the same but the Mortar has, hands down, the superior BIOS. Better features and, with LLC, better voltage control so it's easier to get more stable overclock that's gentle on the CPU while idle. It's also seen more frequent updates and quicker attention. Just all around better.

Also, the G3 uses 'offset' Vcore adjustment ONLY which seems to screw up the ability to gage Vdroop in operation. So no utility can provide an accurate Vcore voltage while stress testing (I had to probe at the processor socket). Not good for tweaking a good overclock.
 
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neiler0847

neiler0847

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Mar 25, 2015
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I finally have my msi B350m Mortar Arctic system up and completely running. The time it took was my fault, and not the fault of the motherboard.

I've mated the motherboard with a Ryzen 3 1200 processor and 16 GB (2 x 8GB) of G.Skill Flare X 2400MHz RAM. I'm using the Wraith Spire LED cooler that came with my Ryzen 7 1700.

The base clock is 3.1 GHz. I have all of the cores running at 3.4 GHz. This gets me 54 degrees Celcius at 100% load. At 3.4 GHz and idle, the CPU is 31 degrees (20 degrees ambient). I haven't touched any voltage numbers yet, just goofed around with the multiplier. I feel like I haven't begun to challenge the machine.

The RAM worked as expected right out of the box. I hope so. the Flare X is designed specifically for Ryzen. The Flare X was NOT on the QVL for the motherboard, but I bought it anyway.

The motherboard does have an LED header, which I plugged the Wraith Spire LED wire into. I'm not sure though that I am going to be able to control the colour of the LED ring the way I can with my ASRock motherboard. So right now it's a kind of pinky-white colour.

I have four drives connected to the motherboard, including a SanDisk 240GB SSD, a 2.5" Barracuda laptop HDD (2TB), a 3.5" WD Black HDD (2TB) and a 3.5" Seagate HDD (1.5TB). I'm running 7 case fans in my In Win 303 case.

The only issue I seem to be having is that the system is struggling to reconnect to mapped network drives each time I restart. I haven't finished diagnosing this.

The GPU is a used msi GTX 950 is got off kijiji. I don't game on the PC, so it easily handles whatever I give it.

Some folks have complained about the motherboard being slow to post. I haven't done any timing or comparisons, but I haven't found it notably slow.

This was my first msi motherboard. The BIOS is pretty intuitive. The custom fan curve support is there. There have been monthly BIOS updates since the board's inception, which is nice to see. There are lots of msi tools to download and try. Overall I'm very pleased.
 
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drea.drechsler

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Oct 16, 2017
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Earlier BIOS versions were notorious for slow posting. I never experienced that myself, though, as I updated to the latest at the time (vA.7 for Arctic, v1.7 for regular Mortar) as a first step after confirming the system was functional.

There seem to be some MSI haters around...not sure why but maybe from prior experience with some sketchy designs. But this Mortar seems to be a very good board, all things considered, and easily outpaces the Gigabyte board (AB350M Gaming 3) I mistakenly bought first based on very high praise for Gigabyte's reputation.

 
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