MSI X99A Gaming 7 Motherboard Review

BIOS

The BIOS scheme and layout is MSI’s usual offering. If you have an MSI motherboard purchased in the last 12 months this will be familiar to you and very easy to use. We can set this up in about 60 seconds owing to the number of MSI motherboards we have owned or tested.

There is an advanced mode, as with most BIOSes these days, we have only taken screenshots of the simple layout and options.

Finally, the MSI fan control section. We left this on auto/smart fan control settings for the purpose of benchmarking. Our test rig is an open air chassis so only the CPU fan setting had any real impact.

Testing Set Up

We have retried our trusty PNY GTX 770 and promoted the MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V to our baseline test bench card. The GTX 970 is still a relevant card, many use it and it’s one of our favourites. We have also moved away from RAID and base lined our test rig with the Crucial BX100 500Gb SSD.

• Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
• Processor: Intel i7-5820K
• Graphics: MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V
• Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz
• Drives: Crucial BX100 500Gb SSD
• Cooler: Scythe Mugen MAX CPU Cooler
• PSU: Corsair HX1000i

All synthetic tests are carried out three times with the best result taken. All gaming tests are carried out three times with the best results taken. All game tests, multi player or otherwise, are carried out three times with the best average taken. If the game is an online multi player, a ping constantly under 40ms is required before a test is valid.

Synthetic Tests

• PCMark 08 Professional
• 3DMark Professional
• AIDA64 Engineer
• CrystalDiskMark
• IO Meter

Real World Tests

• Battlefield 4
• Crysis 3

AIDA64 CPUID

We used the i7-5820K. and some Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz.

With level 1 and 2 cache at 32Kb and 256Kb respectively, overshadowed by a whopping 15Mb level 3 cache. We used the XMP setting and left the RAM settings on Auto.