Introduction
Today, we’ve MSI’s top-of-the-line mini-ITX motherboard, the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI. That is the subsequent step up from the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI that we reviewed in June of 2025, and we quite liked it. Now we are able to see if this higher-end version is well worth the nearly double the value tag at $449.99 MSRP.
For a mini-ITX motherboard, there are quite a couple of options for expansion, from the everyday single PCIe slot, two (2) memory slots, and a 5-in-1 XPANDER card giving the flexibility to put in a 3rd total NVME drive, together with two (2) SATA ports. This provides the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI probably the most connectivity options we’ve seen to this point on a mini-ITX motherboard.
Packaging and Contents
With the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI coming in at a whopping $449.99 MSRP, there are frequently loads of extras included (wanted or not); nonetheless, that shouldn’t be really the case with this motherboard, because it is more targeted at high-end performance within the smallest package possible. Whenever you crack open the box you’ll two (2) SATA cables, an EZ Front Panel Cable, a 1 to three EZ Conn-Cable (V2), a cable for the 5-in-1 XPANDER USB 5Gbps port, the EZ WIFI antenna set of three M.2 screws, the 5-in-1 XPANDER card, a sticker sheet, the everyday Regulatory notice and quick start guide, and a USB stick. This USB stick is pre-loaded with all of the drivers and software you will have to get your system up and running.
MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI Features
Like the opposite MSI MPG mini-ITX motherboards we’ve checked out, the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI follows with the identical overall white and silver color scheme that has been a staple of the recent EDGE series within the MPG line of motherboards. After this, MSI has included the 2 (2) DDR5 memory slots, two (2) M.2 slots native to the motherboard, nonetheless there are not any SATA ports on the motherboard itself, as an alternative in the placement you’ll typically find it, is the XPANDER card we’ll touch on later. For cooling, MSI has gone full force with their FROZR setup on this motherboard, each with an oversized heat sink for the MOSFETs and the cooling for the first NVME drive.
Power Delivery
MSI has targeted the higher-end mini-ITX AMD market with this motherboard, and while the 8+2+1 Duet Rail Power System on the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI is nothing to put in writing home about, it does provide a complete of 110Amps of power through Smart Power Stage. In actual fact, this ought to be good enough power to run all current AM5 processors with full Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) enabled while keeping cool while doing it. That is on account of the lively cooling MSI has provided on the oversized FROZR heatsink for MOSFET cooling, something we do infrequently see, which worked quite well in our testing, as you will notice below.
Memory and Storage
As with other AMD motherboards we’ve reviewed in the present generation, the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI is able to running only Un-buffered, Non-ECC DDR5 memory at a maximum of 64 GB per slot. This provides a complete maximum capability of 128 GB total, which is consistent with other motherboards of this class/size. Overclocking/speed adjustments for RAM on this motherboard is as easy as it will probably be with AMD’s EXPO settings within the UEFI, together with the flexibility to dive even deeper and manually adjust all timings, speed, and voltages for individual sticks of memory. This results in a state’s maximum memory speed of 10,000 MT/s, which is considered one of the very best speeds we’ve seen officially claimed for a motherboard to this point. Unfortunately, we’re unable to totally test this as our Patriot Kit has a maximum speed of 6,200 MT/s, which we had no issues meeting and maintaining for our testing.
More often than not, with a mini-ITX, there can be two (2) M.2 slots, and that’s the case here until you think about the XPANDER card supplied with the motherboard. This card slots in on the fitting below the 24-pin ATX connector on the fitting side of the motherboard, supplying you with the flexibility so as to add a 3rd M.2 NVME drive to this motherboard. This is sweet, until you realize that the best way the cardboard is installed limits you to considered one of two scenarios: installing a card that doesn’t require any heatsinks, or removing the right-most RAM slot to suit a drive in with a heat sink.
For SATA ports, there are none actually situated on the motherboard itself; if you have to use them, the XPANDER card is required. The XPANDER card provides each of the SATA 6 GB/s ports, which MSI has positioned in order that they point “out” of the cardboard to permit for easier wiring.
Expansion
With this being a mini-ITX motherboard, expansion is restricted to the only PCIe 5.0 x16 slot situated in the traditional location. For this slot, MSI has included their Steel Armour system that’s all the time a nice addition to see on a motherboard with the increasing size and weight of graphics cards with every latest generation. As with other mini-ITX motherboards, from most manufacturers, not only MSI, we wish that MSI had provided an oversized release lever for the PCIe slot.
I/O
The MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI has a few of the perfect I/O options we’ve seen on a mini-ITX motherboard up to now. For the rear I/O panel, USB options are plenty, with two (2) Type-C 40 Gbps ports (Each of which support DisplayPort 1.4 standard for video output), one (1) Type-C 10 Gbps port, and five (5) Type-A ports at 10 Gbps maximum speed. After this, there’s a single HDMI port for video out, the everyday antenna connections for the WIFI 7 chip (a MediaTek MT7927), in addition to a ethernet port for as much as 5 Gbps through the Realtek 8126 controller. Beyond these connection options, there’s a Clear CMOS button for clearing the BIOS if there’s a nasty configuration, in addition to a Flash BIOS button to permit for flashing the BIOS with none CPU or memory installed. Lastly, there are the everyday Line-Out, Mic-in, and S/PDIF ports for audio, all from the ALC4080 Codec, supporting as much as 7.1 channel surround sound.
On the motherboard itself, there are not any headers for USB expansion, which is handled by the M2 riser card for a header for 2 (2) USB 2.0 ports, and the XPANDER card that has a connection for a USB Type-C 20 Gbps connector, in addition to a USB Type-C able to 5 Gbps. The front panel speaker connection can be situated on the XPANDER card, together with the front panel speaker connection. Beyond this, there’s a header for front panel connectors (LED indicators and switches), situated right below the DDR5 memory slots, which can be easy to attach with the “EZ Front Panel Cable” provided within the box.
In total, there are three (3) 4-pin PWM fan headers provided, one (1) dedicated to the CPU fan, one (1) for the system pump, and the last for system fans. There’s also limited RGB expansion opportunities for the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI, as there’s a single Addressable V2 RGB LED connector, situated on the M.2 riser card (Adjoining to the M2_1 slot).
UEFI
As we see on all current generation MSI motherboards, the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI has MSI’s “Click BIOS X”, which we’ve come to understand for its ease of use. Whenever you initially enter the BIOS, you’re greeted with the usual EZ Mode, where you possibly can quickly adjust memory settings and CPU boost, together with fan speeds/profile, in addition to have a fast take a look at operating speeds for the CPU and memory.
Since this iteration of MSI’s UEFI has been out for quite some time, and covered in depth on previous reviews here at The FPS Review, we’re going to hit just the highlights. One in every of the things we would like to be sure to indicate is that regardless that it is a graphical UEFI with mouse input, it is extremely much keyboard-friendly with shortcuts reminiscent of “F7” for Advanced Mode, or “F1” to access the assistance menu. In actual fact, we rarely touched our mouse during configuration and updates because it was very easy to navigate with the keyboard.
Whenever you dive into Advanced mode, you’ll immediately be greeted with a System Status screen, showing you EUFI version information, storage device data, and the data in your CPU / RAM / Voltages on the fitting side (Which is a relentless between menu pages in any section/mode of the UEFI). Mainly, all settings may be accessed from the “Advanced” sub-menu, from Power management settings, to an NVMe self test, to the Overclocking menu, all easily accessed with a small note at the underside of the monitor explaining what each option is. It’s nice to notice that although you possibly can access overclocking settings through the Advanced menu, MSI has also made it a dedicated menu on the essential “Advanced” page, supplying you with access to all of your voltage information, clock speeds, and memory timings.
As all the time, what we’ve touched on is just the surface of what is obtainable for modifying within the UEFI. We now have created a full gallery below to point out all different pages and options inside the UEFI.
Motherboard Performance
As with all of our recent 2025 reviews, we can be using our latest performance section. You’ll discover images of all of our testing leads to the gallery, while the next paragraphs summarize what we experienced. As with our 2025 AMD reviews, in 2026, we can be using our Ryzen 9 7900X CPU for all of our performance benchmarks.
Our first test is the storage test and as we mentioned above, while we were in a position to test with each our MSI SPATIUM M570 PRO FROZR (originally reviewed at the top of 2023) as our primary drive, and our ADATA LEGEND 970 2TB NVME SSE within the XPANDER Slot, nonetheless on account of the dimensions of the motherboard and the placement of the XPANDER slot, we’re only using a single stick of memory within the system for this test only. On the M570, we recorded a read speed of 12,406 MB/s and a write speed of 11,667 MB/s, each of which were right consistent with our expected speeds for the drive. The second slot is restricted to Gen4 PCIe speeds, and as such, we were limited to 7,141 MB/s read speeds and 6,918 MB/s write, again right consistent with what we’ve historically seen this drive do on this scenario.
The subsequent test is our memory testing using AIDA64’s Cache & Memory Benchmark. The MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI was in a position to achieve a read speed of 76,686 MB/s, a write speed of 75,881 MB/s, and a duplicate speed of 70,417 MB/s, all of that are a bit below what we’ve come to expect from the X870 platform with this CPU and memory combination, and far closer to the B850 scores we’ve seen.
Our synthetic benchmark tests are up next, with 3DMark, PCMark, Cinebench (R23 and 2024), V-Ray, Blender, and at last GeekBench6. 3DMark is available in with a rating of 13,120 for max threads within the CPU Profile test, and a CPU rating of 20,648 for Night Raid with a complete rating of 10,195 (Includes full system). PCMark is available in with a complete rating of 6,972, which is a platform low we’ve seen with this CPU. After this, Cinebench R23 clocks in at 29,644 points on the Multi-Core, and a couple of,033 points on the Single-Core test, and 2024 is available in with 1,659 points and 122 points respectively, each Cinebench results bring us back to where we expect to be with our testing.
With V-Ray, we had a final rating of 31,211, which is correct at what we expect with this setup. Blender is available in at 195 for the Monster test, 135 for junkshop, and 104 for classroom, again right consistent with expectations. Our final synthetic benchmark is Geekbench, where we hit a Multi-Core rating of 17,893 and a Single-Core rating of two,981, which falls a bit wanting previous testing.
VRM Temperature
The last testing we accomplished on the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI is the VRM temperature test. For this test, we run the Cinebench 2023 Multi-Core test for at least quarter-hour to totally stress the system. On the 15-minute mark, we take a screenshot and record the temperatures as reported by probably the most current version of HWiNFO 64, in addition to a manual temperature reading with a Handheld Infrared thermometer. All testing occurs at an ambient temperature of roughly 75°F (24°C).
Cooling for the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI is great for a mini-ITX motherboard, due to its lively cooling solution that has been implemented. Our handheld thermometer read a extreme temperature of 48°C, while HWiNFO gave us a maximum MOSFET temperature of 79.5°F, and a chipset temperature of 63.7°C. Surprisingly, outside of the chipset temperature, this is definitely worse than the B850I MPG offering from MSI we reviewed in June of last yr.
Conclusion
In our testing today of the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI, we saw that performance lined up with our expectations for a mini-ITX high-performance motherboard, but that’s about it. Its cooling was greater than robust enough to fulfill the stresses of our testing; overclocking is prone to be limited on this motherboard.
Installation and Use
The physical installation of the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI was easy enough, for getting it into our test bed and Windows up and running. The large issues or qualms we’ve with the layout are with two things. One, the dearth of an oversized release for the PCIe slot, which is something we had begun to see on most motherboards, and in recent months, the most recent releases all appear to be neglecting this. And two, the placement of the XPANDER card severely limits its utility for installing a second NVMe drive.
Beyond the problems listed above, we had zero issues in accessing the UEFI and updating it. And we definitely had no issues with installing Windows 11, and all of our testing software, with no driver installation issues noted.
Final Points
We are able to’t help but feel that the MSI X870I EDGE TI EVO WIFI is a product and not using a real target market. With its $449.99 MSRP, it’s priced for the high performing market, nonetheless it isn’t any higher in our testing than the MPG B850I offering from MSI. It also seems to try solving the difficulty of getting a 3rd M.2 slot on a mini-ITX motherboard, nonetheless it does this on the expense of getting a drive that requires cooling, otherwise you lose a precious RAM slot. We might have somewhat seen this card mirrored to place the USB4 front panel port on the side of the drive, and take away the SATA ports to present a greater fit on the motherboard.