The MSI MEG X399 Creation Motherboard Review: The New 16-Phase Shark In Town

CPU Performance, Short Form

For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.

3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.

Rendering - LuxMark v3.1: link

As a synthetic, LuxMark might come across as somewhat arbitrary as a renderer, given that it's mainly used to test GPUs, but it does offer both an OpenCL and a standard C++ mode. In this instance, aside from seeing the comparison in each coding mode for cores and IPC, we also get to see the difference in performance moving from a C++ based code-stack to an OpenCL one with a CPU as the main host.

While the C++ results remain in line, the performance during the OpenCL test within LuxMark was noticeably higher. This result surprised me a bit, and I'm still not quite sure why MSI's board is ahead like it is.

Rendering - Blender 2.78: link

For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.

The scores outputted in our Blender 2.78 benchmark from the MSI MEG X399 Creation motherboard was one of the highest achieved so far with our Ryzen Threadripper 1950X sample, albeit just marginally better than the GIGABYTE X399 Designare EX model.

Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms. 7-Zip 9.2: link

With similar scores across all of the boards tested, the MSI MEG X399 Creation outputted a similar score to the ASRock X399 Taichi, with a marginally worse score than the rest of the pack.

Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link

As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.

7-Zip performance focuses on compressing and decompressing data and the MSI X399 Creation displayed a score slightly off the mark in comparison to other X399 boards reviewed. While not a major concern, the score given was rather close to the ASRock X399 Taichi with around 100 points in score separating the two boards.

Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link

The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation, and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).

The higher score given in DigiCortex is most probably a result of a switch in RAM modules. Although we've taken measures to make the computational and memory based area of the test bench consistent with the previous X399 test bench, the increase is likely to come from better performing Samsung B-die memory ICs whereas the previous Corsair modules I suspect were using Hynix based ICs in a different chip configuration.