FRONTPAGE MSI X99S Gaming 9 AC Motherboard Review

[Overclockers.com]

Its a good day to be a PC enthusiast I have to say. A couple of weeks ago, Intel released their new Haswell-E enthusiast line of CPU's and motherboards. Our very own Lvcoyote*had a chance to review the flagship CPU, the i7 5960X, as well as a couple of other motherboards so far. Today, I bring you the first MSI X99 offering in its high end gaming board, the X99S Gaming 9 AC. This board is packed with some neat features such as the new Streaming Engine. It offers game play recording that takes the load off the CPU and potentially allows for more FPS and better quality recordings among other things it does. There are some some architectural differences such as the first non-server implementation of DDR4. It is time to see what fruit this tree shall bear!


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[Hippogriff]

It's a features rich motherboard and that streaming card is worth $100+ alone (if it works well).

But why include just one Killer lan?

 

[EarthDog]

Good question.. and not to answer a question with one, but... I ask why two (outside of the obvious redundancy)? Why would a board marketed at gamers use two NICs?

 

[Hippogriff]

So you can decide to not use the Killer NIC.

Good question.. and not to answer a question with one, but... I ask why two (outside of the obvious redundancy)? Why would a board marketed at gamers use two NICs?

 

[EarthDog]

Lol, ok... Gotcha.

 

[Atari]

I'm curious if this board handles quad channel memory? I'm seeing a lot of negative reviews on newegg and such with people putting in four sticks and the board not being able to handle it.

 

[EarthDog]

The board was tested with quad channel at 3000mhz throughout every test, including the overclocking and pushing the limits the review. Also, only one person of 8 complained about ram at newegg... It could be the ram, cpu, board.. who knows. I

Give the review a read...

 

[Woomack]

You are getting weirdly low results in AIDA64 at 3000 clock. Memory write depends from CPU/cache and this is fine but read/copy base more on memory speed itself. In my Crucial 2133 15-15-15 tests ( on stock settings ) I had 12GB/s higher memory copy with CPU at 4.2GHz. Even in your review there is 2GB/s higher memory copy result on stock than after OC
Probably it's early BIOS issue, hard to say but I had something similar at some settings on MSI X99S SLI Plus. Actually X99S Sli Plus for me looks like X99S Gaming without useless stuff I bet that BIOS and other things are similar too but for my board there were more BIOSes already.

I don't know if you have the same but my 5820K is not scalling good past 4.5GHz. 4.6GHz needs ~1.4V but for 4.9GHz it already needs 1.6V. At 1.6V under full load my board is shutting down even if I change OCP/OVP settings.
One qustion regarding BIOS. Is there internal PLL overvoltage option ? I have no option like that and I've noticed my CPU is acting weird at 4.7GHz+ so I'm not sure if it's related some way ... or maybe it's hidden and set to enabled all the time.

 

[EarthDog]

Funny you mention that... I noticed it tonight when testing the sticks themselves. I tried the 1.1 and latest 1.2 bios with the same results. I do not have any other sticks to compare it to, however, I do have another board that I will pop in and try tonight.

My 5820K does just about the same thing. I need 1.4x for 4.5GHz but I can't get things very stable past that on ambient water. Truth be told though I haven't had time to really tweak and push things.

I do not recall a PLL overvoltage option, no.

 

[EarthDog]

Sorry to double post, but... I swapped boards out into the Fatality Killer and the results are the same there using the XMP profile. I tried to use XMP2 profile (2666 CL14) and speeds were in the same ballpark.

Is it the sticks? Single bank?

 

[Woomack]

Probably memory is forcing more relaxed sub timings when you set higher clock or higher strap. ASRock also needs 125MHz strap ?

I also had weirdly low performance at 3000 memory clock on MSI and I wasn't sure why. In my case results were better when I was tightening timings but couldn't set it as good as I wanted because memory just couldn't run any tighter. For me best clocks are 2666-2800 on both Micron and Hynix IC.

 

[EarthDog]

Yep, it also needs the 125 strap on the asrock board.