Introduction
Today, we are going small on our test bench with the new MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI. This is one of MSI’s latest ITX form factors, and the first ITX for us on the current AMD platform. Normally, we don’t associate an ITX motherboard with high performance, but this one has all the looks of a contender for a go-to ITX motherboard.
The MPG series slots right in the middle of MSI’s current offering, and is designed to be the “go-to” for gamers looking to have a good price-to-performance ratio. With a current MSRP of $249.99, it can certainly be considered a contender.
With the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI MSI has maintained the familiar silver-white look of other EDGE TI motherboards, as well as some other features we have come to expect from MSI like the implementation of their Shield Frozr system for the M.2 drive on the front, and the Shield Armor reinforcement on the only PCIe slot. MSI actually exceeds the base requirement from AMD by providing both a Gen5 PCIe slot, along with the Gen5 M.2 slot located on the front of the motherboard. Beyond this, you will also find the normal 20Gbps USB-C port, along with a 10Gbps USB-C port for high-speed connectivity.
Packaging and Contents
On first look package contents on the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI are relatively sparse for an MPG motherboard; however, don’t be like us and actually lift the cardboard holding the motherboard in the box and look below it, as there is additional contents located there.
So, what will you find included with this small motherboard? You will find the EZ WIFI antenna, a 3-piece pack of M.2 screws, a single SATA cable, cable organization stickers, the standard EU Regulatory notice, a quick installation guide, an EZ Front Panel Cable for quick and easy connection to your front panel buttons and lights, an RGB cable, and a 1 to 3 EZ Conn-Cable. This last cable is an exclusive cable to MSI’s 800 series motherboards (Both AMD and Intel), and it intends to help clean up your case wiring by combining fan power connectors and RGB cables into a single cable for quick and easy connection.
MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI Features
As we mentioned in the introduction, MSI has maintained its familiar silver-white color scheme on the EDGE series of motherboards with the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI. Outside of how small an ITX motherboard is to the average user, you will find that this motherboard actually packs a bit more than meets the eye.
You will find the two DDR5 slots and the normal power connectors, along with a single PCIe slot. But what you will really notice is the large powered cooler on the lone M.2 slot on the front. We keep clarifying on the front because MSI has done something we have not seen very frequently, and added an M.2 slot to the rear of the motherboard to give the end user the ability to have additional storage.
Power Delivery
MSI has gone with a relatively conservative 8+2+1 Smart Power Stage 90 Amp design for power delivery on this motherboard. This means you will likely not achieve much, if any, of an overclock outside of AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive system on this motherboard, but it also won’t be a mini-space heater on your desk where ITX motherboards typically end up. For this, MSI has provided what they are calling an Extended Heatsink, that frankly is not much smaller than we see on a normal B850 motherboard from MSI, to help with cooling of the entire motherboard.
Memory and Storage
The MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI runs with DDR5, unbuffered, non-ECC memory, with a maximum capacity of 128GB (maximum of 64 GB per slot), matching the maximum per-slot capacity we have seen on a current generation motherboard. With this, you will also have AMD EXPO support for memory overclocking, of which we had no issues with our trusty Patriot DDR5 6400MT/s kit achieving.
For NVMe storage, you will have two (2) total M.2 slots, both supporting 2280-sized storage devices. As we mentioned earlier, there is a slot on the front of the motherboard, which is the Gen5 slot, that also has the Frozr active cooling system provided, and is located in the normal location above the PCIe slot. The second slot is on the back side of the motherboard, directly opposite the front slot.
There are a few items we want to point out regarding the M.2 slots on this motherboard. First, both slots are limited to only 2280-sized devices, which won’t be an issue for many users, but is something we want to mention. Second, the front slot is very close to the cooling, so close that we were unable to use our normal primary MSI M570 Gen5 NVMe for testing and had to use our ADATA (As mentioned in the performance review section) instead.
And finally, with the second slot being located on the rear of the motherboard, and without us having any spare NVMe drives without an integral cooler, we were unable to test it in our time with this motherboard. That being said, it is a Gen4 drive, and we see no indication that it would not have the ability to meet the standard performance we have come to expect on most modern motherboards. The last thing we want to mention is that MSI has provided two (2) total SATA 6 GB/s ports for any other storage the end user might want to include.
Expansion
With the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI being an ITX motherboard, there is not much room for expansion. In fact, there is a single PCIe slot, which is a Gen5 slot instead of the minimum required Gen4 from AMD on a B850-based motherboard. It is nice to see MSI provide its Steel Armour for metal reinforcement of this slot; however, it is slightly disappointing not to see an extended release lever that we saw on previous generations for easy release of a graphics card.
I/O
I/O for the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI is surprisingly good for a motherboard in this form factor. On the Rear I/O, you will find one (1) USB-C 20 Gbps port, three (3) USB-A 10Gbps ports, and two (2) USB-A 5Gbps ports, with no USB 2.0 standard ports on the rear. After this, you will have a Realtek 8126 5Gbps LAN connection, antenna connections for WIFI-7 connectivity, an HDMI port for the only video connectivity available, and a Flash BIOS button along with a Clear CMOS button located at the top. Lastly, there are three total audio connections: an S/PDIF out, a Mic-In, and an L-Out that are provided by the Realtek ALC4080 codec, allowing for up to 7.1 channel surround sound.
Internal connectivity is no slouch for an ITX motherboard, with multiple expansion options offered. You have the ability to add another USB-C port for 10Gbps speed, two (2) USB-A 5Gbps ports, along with an additional two (2) USB-A 2.0 speed ports, all of which are provided from the B850 chipset).
After the network connectivity and USB connectivity options, there is one 3-pin ARGB Gen2 connector for direct connection to RGB strips, along with the ports needed for the 1 to 3 EZConn cable we mentioned earlier. Outside of this, there are a total of only three (3) fan connectors, with one (1) stated for a CPU fan, one (1) for a system fan, and one (1) for either a water-pump or system fan.
UEFI
For the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI, MSI is again using its new Click BIOS X. There are no obvious changes that we could readily tell off the bat. As normal, it opens to the EZ Mode option, and as we saw in the last MSI motherboard review, mouse input now works flawlessly.
In the EZ Mode page, you have quick access to your CPU boost settings, memory speed settings, storage information, fan speed information, and access to some EZ Config settings in the bottom left for quick, often changed settings.
To get to the Advanced mode, either hit “F7” or simply click on it in the UEFI. From here, you will see almost the same settings in the Advanced section as we saw in the MSI MPG X870E CARBON WIFI review we did at the end of last year. Instead of listing off all the options there are for tweaking, we encourage you to take a look at the gallery below, where we captured almost all of the options you can possibly adjust in this motherboard.
Motherboard Performance
As with all of our recent 2025 reviews, we will be using our new performance section. You will find images of all of our testing results in the gallery, while the following paragraphs summarize what we experienced. As always with our AMD 2025 reviews, we will have the Ryzen 9 7900X as the CPU of choice for testing. There are a few new changes as of this review. As of June, we have not had luck getting Blender to run for us, so it has been dropped for testing at this time, but we are putting a GeekBench 6 score into our results to add a different look to the results.
Our first point of testing, like always, is our storage test, which, as we mentioned earlier, consists of a single run of our ADATA LEGEND 970 2TB NVME SSD as the only drive installed. With this test, we are using CrystalDiskMark as always, with the 1 GiB profile, and we see a Read Speed of 10,041.61 MB/s, and a Write Speed of 10,072.36. While these are not the best speeds we have seen for a Gen5 drive, it is close to the maximum we have run into with this particular drive, which is all we can ask of a motherboard.
Next up is the memory bandwidth test using AIDA64’s Cache & Memory Benchmark. Here, our Patriot memory kit is able to achieve a Memory Read Speed of 76,566 MB/s, a Write Speed of 76,157 MB/s, and a Copy Speed of 70,354 MB/s. These are right in line with what we have come to see with the Ryzen 9 7900X CPU.
After these, we hit the synthetic benchmarks of PCMark, 3Dmark, Cinebench (R23 and 2024), V-Ray, and, new to this review, GeekBench 6. All of these tests came in a little below what we have historically seen with our Ryzen 7900X CPU. For PCMark, we have a total score of 7,015, which is a far cry from the 9,165 we scored on the bigger brother MSI MPG X870E CARBON WIFI last year.
The story was the same when we look at 3Dmark, for the CPU test we are down around 20% from what we expect from this CPU, with a final max thread CPU score of 10,138. This is our first time running Night Raid on the AMD platform, so we do not have a good comparison point currently. It is a similar story for the multi-core score on Cinebench R23, where we are coming in at 26,178 points; however, the single core score is right in line, actually marginally ahead of the X870E testing we have, at 2,018 points.
New to this calendar year is Cinebench 2024, where we have a 1,438 point multi-core score and a 121 point single-core score. V-Ray is no exception to the lower performance than we have historically seen with this CPU, coming in at 28,531 points. The last synthetic test we ran was Geekbench 6 Pro, where we received a single-core score of 3,051 and a multi-core score of 16,470.
VRM Temperature
As with all motherboard testing in 2025, we have our VRM temperature test. For this test, we run Cinebench 2023 for a minimum of 15 minutes, on Multi-Core to fully stress the system. After this, we record the temperature for the VRM/MOSFET as reported by the most current version of HWiNFO 64, as well as a manual temperature reading with a Handheld Infrared thermometer. All testing occurs at an ambient temperature of approximately 75°F (24°C).
With the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI being an ITX motherboard, all of its power components are condensed into a small area, so we expected the temperatures would be high. What we saw was actually the opposite. The highest MOSFET temperature we saw reported was 65°C, with the highest handheld reading being 46.8°C. This is due in part to the large heat spreader MSI has gone with, but is mostly from the 8+2+1 power distribution this motherboard has.
Conclusion
The MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI is definitely not a budget motherboard, at $249.99, but it does come with a lot in a small package. MSI has managed to pack two M.2 NVMe slots into an ITX motherboard, while providing one with their FROZR active cooling solution. Beyond this, we found some higher-end options like the inclusion of MSI’s Steel Armor for metal reinforcement of the lone PCIe slot, as well as memory speeds of a claimed 8,200MHz or more.
Installation and Use
Initial setup of the MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI had very few hiccups, with only two coming to mind. First was being unable to use our primary MSI M570 NVMe drive for our review. The second is more as a reminder to anyone looking to use an ITX form factor, they can be a bit tight to fully wire, and install, however MSI has made this a little less painless by keeping the motherboard layout relatively spread out for fan connectors, front panel connectors, USB headers, and all the other options it has.
When we got to installing Windows, we had very few issues. We were able to be up and running within 30 minutes of starting our installation. Windows was able to find and install most of our drivers. The only thing we had a bit of a hiccup with was with regards to the DirectX 12 for the Ryzen 7900. We had to manually download the AMD drivers and reinstall them, as the Windows installation of the same version did not enable it for us.
Final Points
This motherboard is definitely not the motherboard for the average user; it is an enthusiast DIY motherboard for sure, and it does a great job at it. The MSI MPG B850I EDGE TI WIFI is targeted to a very specific user, the user who is looking for a small form factor build, along with some flashy appearance, and to show it off. It allows for connection of any RGB LED setup you would like, while also giving acceptable performance, all for a $249.99 price. It comes with the option to install up to two (2) NVMe drives, any of the current generation large-size GPUs, and up to two (2) SATA devices to give a fair amount of storage expansion options for this form factor. The main drawback is also what will draw its potential users in, the small size and add-in expansion it can offer.