MSI X99A Gaming 7 Motherboard Review

Next Crysis 3 and we set the graphics to medium for this, giving the motherboard more of a chance to make a difference, and give the graphics card a breather!

We would say the MSI is slightly behind for this set of results. This was the general trend though generally only marginally and not a noticeable difference during game play. What did the MSI offer over the Asus for gaming? Nothing much, a focused gaming app perhaps, but the main thing is that it is happy to spar with flagships, though at this level, there shouldn’t be much of a difference between models.

The Asus offers a much more complex memory set up, for example. This would aid optimisations and set up profiles that could edge out the performance, especially during overclocking. Though the results vary, we reckon there still isn’t much in it at stock settings.

Next, we have some USB 3.1 tests. We tested this USB 3.1 ports against the USB 3.0 ports of the same motherboard as the Asus doesn’t have any.

We didn’t really have any real ideas about USB 3.1 being the next best thing so we tested with an external SSD, the Lexar Professional Workflow DD512. Though a USB 3.0 device, it should benefit from the additional bandwidth that 3.1 provides.

It is not going to get close the the maximum capabilities but it will free up the USB 3.0 speeds a little.

Which it did! It’s only marginal but we found some performance increase when using USB 3.0 devices in a 3.1 port. A bit obvious maybe but we need to be careful getting hung up on something like 3.1.

Yes it is claimed to be  2x faster than USB 3.0 and 20X faster than USB 2.0 with Up to 10Gbps data transfer bandwidth but when do we ever see that. The speeds are astonishing, and probably max out the Lexar Professional Workflow DD512 but by the time USB 3.1 is mainstream, you will probably be thinking about an upgrade anyway.

In the meantime you will get a bit more bandwidth from your USB 3.0 devices and you can now use you 3.1 pen drives now as well.

Forgetting the slow burn roll out of USB 3.1, the results are superb, and you won’t be waiting long when transferring files if you have compatible devices.

Conclusion

We really enjoyed our time with the MSI X99A Gaming 7 Motherboard. It has a feel and quality to it that gives it a bit of an X Factor, and not in the trash TV sense. The bundle is a bit naff and we felt it had been thrown into the box without much care and attention. Once it was up and running however, it was a charmer.

We are glad it doesn’t have Wi-Fi, if you are buying a motherboard of this stature then are you really going to Wi-Fi it up and try and game with another source of latency? We think not, take heed Asus!

It looks amazing, you can’t really go wrong with black and red. Is there anything not to like? Not really, it’s even reasonably priced at just over £200 in the UK and nearly $300 in America.

After testing we mounted it in the NZXT H440 red and black chassis and it looked like a marriage made in heaven. We also tried some AIO coolers, the NZXT Kraken X61 and the Corsair H110i GT and after switching the LEDs to red, we had a perfect looking high end rig in red and black! Coming up in our NZXT H440 review. We are sold on this one, it’s fast and it doesn’t cause us any concerns about reliability, speed, looks and cost, epic!