MSI X99S MPower Review: Sting Like a Bee

MSI X99S MPower In The Box

We mention in every motherboard review that the box content matters. In some cases, depending on the extras, it can approach 5-10% of the overall system cost. In an industry where every part of a cent is examined in close scrutiny, shaving $0.02 by taking out a couple of SATA cables is done on a regular basis. With the high end market there is more leniency to include these extras, especially when it comes to a themed range such as gaming or overclocking. The point here is that the motherboard manufacturer wants to envelop the user into their ecosystem and their products, and the box contents are one angle of attack. MSI’s box contents are as follows

OC Themed Rear Shield
OC Themed Chassis Badge
User Guide
Overclocking Guide
Software Guide
OC Door Hanger
MSI Poster
Quick Start Guide
Cable Stickers
Easy Connectors for Front Panel
Driver Disk
Six SATA Cables
Two Flexi-SLI Bridges

There is a good amount going on here, especially with a bundled overclocking guide. The door hanger and poster is a bit much for anyone over 25, which is doubled by the fact that this platform is geared for those with a bit more spare cash which tends to be the generation over 25. The chassis badge is reasonably decent, and six SATA cables for 10 ports is par for the course. What MSI has failed to realize is the SLI situation – for three-way GPU setups, two SLI cables is not enough. When trying to implement three-way SLI with flexi-cables, such as with GTX 770 Lightnings that stick out in the way of rigid connectors, you need three cables in what feels like a very odd configuration:

The SLI paths go from card 1 to card 2, card 2 to card 3 and card 1 to card 3. Any other combination refuses to enable SLI mode in the drivers we use, but it means that three cables are required. So MSI’s product team that figured out the included bundles are either too familiar to Crossfire and assume it is the same, or just missed the ball.

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:

Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.

Test Setup

MSI X99S MPower Overclocking

Experience with MSI X99S MPower

MSI has several things right with the way they do things. The look of the motherboards is often a plus point, as well as the positive branding. Software such as Live Update is a plus to the business as well. The overclocking side of things, while they have improved with the realignment of the BIOS options for X99, still needs a fair bit of work. For the automatic overclock options, we only get a choice of OC Genie in one of two very similar modes. There is no option to test for peak overclocks, or a variety of overclocks to choose from. These two modes are all there is to work with, which for someone who wants to overclock but doesn’t have the confidence is not the best way to do things. I have spoken to MSI on this issue, in order to expand their look-up-tables for overclocking options, and I hope it changes in the future.

For manual overclocking, the software has one big issue relating to the voltage on offer. Command Center offers a dial up to 2.1 volts for the CPU, which is partially insane as even extreme overclockers do not need that much. A better way would be to offer 1.4 volts in software and have an advanced mode that extends that range.  Manual overclocking from the BIOS was straight forward enough now that MSI has adjusted the order of the OC options, however there are a number of options that make no sense even with the help guide attached, such as the vDroop control. MSI needs to hire someone who can convert the overtly engineer-only technical jargon to something more understandable and more relatable to the end user.

From our overclocking performance, we saw nothing out of the ordinary here on our mediocre CPU. The first OC Genie mode caused an OCCT error due to the voltage being too low.

Methodology

Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.

For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.

Overclock Results