Board Layout and Pictures

Well, I hope you like red and black because that’s what you get with the B360 Gaming Plus. This board is a little old school with the traditional gaming colors. That said this has been one of the most popular color combinations for a long time, only recently when RGB has become popular have the color neutral layouts taken off. Anyhow the B360 Gaming Plus is a full ATX board with a standard layout. That means four DDR4 DIMMs over on the right, a center-mounted LGA socket with heatsinks above and to the left of it, a chipset cooler to the right of the PCIe slots. The Chipset cooler is a little higher than normal though. The ATX form factor also means there aren’t any weird layout issues with power and other connections as well.

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Okay for cooling, like I mentioned the B360 Gaming Plus has two heatsinks around the CPU socket. Neither of them are huge and they don’t have an overly intricate design but they are aluminum and they look to be painted or powder coated with a rough flat black finish with the randomly like red trim across the top. Then you have the chipset cooler down to the right of the PCIe slots. This one has that same textured flat black finish. The red lines here go with the angle of the heatsink and then it has the MSI logo on it as well. The cooler is a diamond shape but then it is sitting at around a 30-degree angle. Because of this the cooler actually covers a lot of space, you can see it up in between the two x16 slots and almost to the edge of the board as well.

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Starting up in the top left corner of the B360 Gaming Plus the CPU socket and the heatsinks and power circuitry that go with it take up a majority of the space here. The rear I/O doesn’t take up as much space ironically without having a big cover on it. But down below the left heatsink, there is a four pin PWM fan header for a case fan and next to it is a 6 pin PCI power connection. It's actually really weird to see an extra power connector here or on a board of this level in general. You only normally see them on the highest end boards. There is also an 8 pin CPU power up top. Normally this would also include a CPU fan header but its not on this side, you can see it over on the right of the top heatsink next to the memory.

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In the top right portion of the B360 Gaming Plus, there is a lot more going on. The four red and black DDR4 DIMMs take up most of the space here but MSI packed in a lot along the side of them. In addition to the two fan headers we already found, there are three more up in the corner. Two are for system fans and the third is for a pump. MSI has the pump header setup to handle up to 2 amps, this is good but a little lower than what some other boards have now (3 or more). Below the fan headers, there is a small array of four LEDs that MSI is calling their EZ Debug LED. Like on other boards, these are labeled for Boot, VGA, RAM, and CPU and they will light up once each of those has happened in the boot process. So basically you will be able to see where the problem is if you don’t boot. Below that is the 24-pin motherboard power. MSI has the DIMM label right here as well and you can see that the two red DIMMs have priority if you are only using two sticks of memory. Last but not least is the USB 3.1 header just below the motherboard power.

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Down in the bottom right corner, there is a LOT going on. It starts with the four right-angled SATA ports that are tucked in right under the chipset cooler. What stood out to me here though was the pad and outline for a right-angled USB 3.1 header that just isn’t here at all. There is a fifth SATA jack that faces up as well just in case you don’t have clearance for the right-angled plugs you at least have something that will work. Then down along the bottom edge is packed with headers. On the far right is the front panel connection. The label is next to it but it follows the same layout you see on all boards anymore. Next to that is the front panel speaker. Above those the TBT1 connector is a thunderbolt add in card connection. The JSPI1 connection next to that is just for reprograming the EPROM do you don’t need to worry about it. Then there are two USB 2.0 headers and the last one over on the left is our 6th PWM fan header.

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Our last corner, the bottom left corner has the most going on so I have to break things down a little. The onboard sound and PCIe slots take up most of the space so I will get to those in just a second. But down along the bottom, there are a few different headers to look at. There is one more PWM header for a total of 7. The JLPT1 port, aka the really wide one, is a parallel port connection, you don’t see these very often anymore. The JCOM1 port next to it is also a rare serial communications port as well. What got me though was the tiny 4 pin header with no label, this is actually the RGB header that uses MSI’s MYSTIC LIGHT and Sync software, you would think it would be red in color or something to help it stand out. On the far left is the front panel audio header, you can see it is right on the split PCB line. Up above that, the JTPM1 labeled header is a trusted platform header. Overall a lot of these connections are business focused but even though this is branded as a gaming board the B360 chipset as a whole is labeled as business or consumer from Intel, I’m just surprised a lot of these headers were still included.

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As for the audio chipset, as I mentioned and as you can see MSI did split this from the normal PCB using a resin line to help prevent interference. They also have left and right channels split into different layers as well.  You get a dual Realtek ALC892 Codec setup with 7.1 audio channels. You do get quality caps but there aren’t very many and the four that are there are all around the “audio boost” audio processor.

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For connections, we have three types here. Up top, there is a single M.2 x4 slot that supports 2242/ 2260 /2280/ 22110 lengths of M.2 devices. Below that then there is an x16 slot, two x1 slots, another x16 length slot, and two more x1. In total, you get two x16 PCIe and four x1 PCIe. Obviously, all of the x1 slots have the x1 bandwidth and they are all PCIe 3.0. The top x16 PCIe slot is always x16 as well and the bottom runs at x4 when the top slot is in use. If you look close you can even see that the bottom one only has pins to the x4 length. The x16 PCIe slot also has a metal shield to give a little additional strength.

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The rear I/O on the B360 Gaming Plus has a lot of free space. You do get both DVI and DisplayPort connections for those who need onboard video, but the large amount of space above those two makes it feel like you are missing things. The 6 port audio connections over on the right aren’t missing anything other than an optical connection but I don’t think very many people use optical connections when it's not an HTPC. Those that do for their desktop audio will have to go with a DAC though. There are two USB 2.0 ports on the far left along with a PS/2 connection for your old Model M keyboard. There are two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports in red below the Intel I219-V Gigabit Ethernet port. Those red USB ports can be a little confusing with the other red port that has a Type-C below it. That is because the Type-C and red port above it are both faster USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports. It has a slightly darker color and the legends on the I/O shield will tell you, but I prefer to be able to spot with colors, especially in the dark.

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As always taking a look at the back of the board gives us a better look at that black PCB. I think I prefer the all-black look of the back than the black with red stripes all over it of the top, but that’s just me. I like that MSI did put a line around the CPU to make sure you don’t run any wires there before installed your cooler bracket. Beyond that, the big thing going on back here are those big google map looking pointers. It looks like MSI has had issues with people shorting out boards by forgetting to check standoffs when installing. They have marked all three of the locations that when using mATX standoff locations would touch the back of the board and short things out. Be careful, don’t blow up your PC before you even get to use it!

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