MSI Mounts USB Type-C On Its New B150 Artillery

[IInuyasha74]

MSI announced new revisions of its B150M Mortar and B150M Bazooka motherboards, which will be sold as the “B150M Morar Arctic” and “B150 Bazooka Plus,” respectively.

MSI Mounts USB Type-C On Its New B150 Artillery : Read more

 

[whiteodian]

Is B150 viable to use in a gaming PC. I'm not planning on doing anything crazy. Just a decent GPU, CPU, and few hard drives. I won't be doing any overclocking. I want to make sure there aren't any major handicaps vs the Z170 for my purposes.

 

[Onus]

I would think so. I've done a lot of H170 boards, and hope to take a look at a few of these too.

 

[velocityg4]

Is B150 viable to use in a gaming PC. I'm not planning on doing anything crazy. Just a decent GPU, CPU, and few hard drives. I won't be doing any overclocking. I want to make sure there aren't any major handicaps vs the Z170 for my purposes.

If you aren't overclocking or doing SLI B150 is fine. For most gamers these boards provide more connections and expand-ability than they will ever use. Really, USB C is nothing more than a gimmick for the average gamer. How many are going to be connecting an external SSD or RAID array? There isn't much else which will saturate USB 3.0 at the gamer or prosumer level necessitating 3.1.

For most there is just going to be a video card, monitor, keyboard, mouse, internal hard drive, optical drive (they will never use), RAM, Speakers/headset, USB backup drive and Ethernet/WiFi connected. Some will opt for a 2.5 SSD fewer will go M.2 or drop the hard drive altogether. Some may buy other controllers.

Having tons of devices connected internally and externally is a lost art. I remember my computers in the late 80s and early 90s. Loaded with expansion cards and external devices.

Overall this would be a good board for most gamers. My only real grievance is no TOSLINK. I prefer using a fiber optic connection to my surround sound. I don't really see the point in six analog audio connectors. Either use a two channel analog connection or use a proper digital connection if you want surround sound. A bunch of analog connections for surround sound is a waste. The source material is digital so you can either go with a pure digital connection or have a loss in quality as it is converted from digital to analog to digital. Of course there always is at least one analog conversion as speakers are not digital.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Is B150 viable to use in a gaming PC. I'm not planning on doing anything crazy. Just a decent GPU, CPU, and few hard drives. I won't be doing any overclocking. I want to make sure there aren't any major handicaps vs the Z170 for my purposes.

Yup, if you aren't doing SLI or overclocking, then B150 is fine.

 

[whiteodian]

Thanks for all the good replies. I was actually thinking about going with the Gigabyte G.1 Sniper B7. I've always liked the green color they use and it looks like a solid board. Probably this a i5 or maybe i7, but hey might as well stick with i5 and keep the cost down since i7 doesn't provide much benefit in gaming. I think what my main concern is that if I use the M.2 and maybe one of the other PCIe slots for say an audio card, will that deduct from the x16 speed of my graphics card.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Thanks for all the good replies. I was actually thinking about going with the Gigabyte G.1 Sniper B7. I've always liked the green color they use and it looks like a solid board. Probably this a i5 or maybe i7, but hey might as well stick with i5 and keep the cost down since i7 doesn't provide much benefit in gaming.

That is one of the nicest B150 motherboards I have seen. The only issue, is that at its price you start venturing into Z170 price range. I know you said you aren't interested in overclocking, but you might want to just think over it and be sure you won't want to in the future, and if you think you will want to go for Z170 instead. Nothing wrong with B150, just you want to be sure about what you will do with the system.