The MSI X299 XPower Gaming AC Review: Flagship Fantasy
by Joe Shields on May 9, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- i9-7900X
Benchmark Overview
For our testing, depending on the product, we attempt to tailor the presentation of our global benchmark suite down into what users who would buy this hardware might actually want to run. For CPUs, our full test suite is typically used to gather data and all the results are placed into Bench, our benchmark database for users that want to look at non-typical benchmarks or legacy data. For motherboards, we run our short form CPU tests, the gaming tests with half the GPUs of our processor suite, and our system benchmark tests which focus on non-typical and non-obvious performance metrics that are the focal point for specific groups of users.
The benchmarks fall into several areas:
Short Form CPU
Our short form testing script uses a straight run through of a mixture of known apps or workloads and requires about four hours. These are typically the CPU tests we run in our motherboard suite, to identify any performance anomalies.
| CPU Short Form Benchmarks | |
| Three Dimensional Particle Movement v2.1 (3DPM) | 3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, derived from my academic research years looking at particle movement parallelism. The coding for this tool was rough, but emulates the real world in being non-CompSci trained code for a scientific endeavor. The code is unoptimized, but the test uses OpenMP to move particles around a field using one of six 3D movement algorithms in turn, each of which is found in the academic literature. |
| The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. | |
| WinRAR 5.4 | WinRAR is a compression based software to reduce file size at the expense of CPU cycles. We use the version that has been a stable part of our benchmark database through 2015, and run the default settings on a 1.52GB directory containing over 2800 files representing a small website with around thirty half-minute videos. We take the average of several runs in this instance. |
| POV-Ray 3.7.1 b4 | POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multi threaded benchmark. |
| HandBrake v1.0.2 | HandBrake is a freeware video conversion tool. We use the tool in to process two different videos into x264 in an MP4 container - first a 'low quality' two-hour video at 640x388 resolution to x264, then a 'high quality' ten-minute video at 4320x3840, and finally the second video again but into HEVC. The low-quality video scales at lower performance hardware, whereas the buffers required for high-quality tests can stretch even the biggest processors. At current, this is a CPU only test. |
| 7-Zip 9.2 | 7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results. |
| DigiCortex v1.20 | 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. |
System Benchmarks
Our system benchmarks are designed to probe motherboard controller performance, particularly any additional USB controllers or the audio controller. As general platform tests we have DPC Latency measurements and system boot time, which can be difficult to optimize for on the board design and manufacturing level.
| System Benchmarks | |
| Power Consumption | One of the primary differences between different motherboads is power consumption. Aside from the base defaults that every motherboard needs, things like power delivery, controller choice, routing and firmware can all contribute to how much power a system can draw. This increases for features such as PLX chips and multi-gigabit ethernet. |
| Non-UEFI POST Time | The POST sequence of the motherboard becomes before loading the OS, and involves pre-testing of onboard controllers, the CPU, the DRAM and everything else to ensure base stability. The number of controllers, as well as firmware optimizations, affect the POST time a lot. We test the BIOS defaults as well as attempt a stripped POST. |
| Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5 | Testing onboard audio is difficult, especially with the numerous amount of post-processing packages now being bundled with hardware. Nonetheless, manufacturers put time and effort into offering a 'cleaner' sound that is loud and of a high quality. RMAA, with version 6.2.5 (newer versions have issues), under the right settings can be used to test the signal-to-noise ratio, signal crossover, and harmonic distortion with noise. |
| USB Backup | USB ports can come from a variety of sources: chipsets, controllers or hubs. More often than not, the design of the traces can lead to direct impacts on USB performance as well as firmware level choices relating to signal integrity on the motherboard. |
| DPC Latency | Another element is deferred procedure call latency, or the ability to handle interrupt servicing. Depending on the motherboard firmware and controller selection, some motherboards handle these interrupts quicker than others. A poor result could lead to delays in performance, or for example with audio, a delayed request can manifest in distinct audible pauses, pops or clicks. |
Gaming
Our gaming benchmarks are designed to show any differences in performance when playing games.
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17 Comments
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BPB - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Sigh, I guess I can always dream about owning such an expensive board. But I can't imagine anybody who is budget conscious or not rich buying one. I wonder how MSI and the others sell enough boards like this to justify making them.Achaios - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Unfortunately, the era of me dreaming of motherboards and CPU's passed long ago with no signs of returning. Nowadays, the only thing I usually dream of is East Asian fleshpots and lots and lots of ambitious girls in, out, on top and below. Do I miss the time my only interest in the world was my Pentium 4, my NVIDIA GO GPU with 128 megs of RAM and World of Warcraft? Sometimes yes but not really.WinterCharm - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Hands down the funniest comment I’ve read on here in a long time :)Ket_MANIAC - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
And another great X299 review. Expecting at least a dozen more such reviews and expecting no review for any AM4 boards or X470 boards at all because who buys cheap stuff. Come on guys, is it really that hard? People already blame you guys to being Intel shills and all and reviews such as these only add fuel to their talk. Not that the review is bad but what reason could you have for this megaload of X299 reviews?rsandru - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Agreed, X299 is going to be replaced soon anyway so even for potential Intel HEDT buyers all those motherboards are most likely non starters... And this one still sports the tiny VRM heat sink that was repeatedly pointed out as being insufficient.To round this perfectly marketed product there’s the ‘gaming’ in the name, as if anyone whose main interest is playing games would pick an X299 platform over a Z370.
Peter2k - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
You'd be surprised how many gamers where absolutely convinced they need quad channel and a bazillion pcie-x lanes for that sweet sweet quad GPU setup they gonna have one day so that they don't throttle when using many M2 SSD'sMarketing must be doing a great job these days
Surprisingly it's the sort of same amount of gamers that don't know that quad GPU setups are dead
Quad channel doesn't do anything for gaming (or most use cases anyway)
Ehh
As long as there are LED's on it
Ket_MANIAC - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link
What I am baffled about is the lack of AM4 motherboard reviews from AnandTech. They are one of the few publications out here who do motherboard reviews right and just 6 reviews in over a year, out of which 3 are boards that no body ever buys when talking about AM4. Yes, they have covered a lot of Ryzen stuff lately. And motherboard reviews are generally not as important as CPU. But if that's the case, how do you justify "16" X299 reviews? And no X399? I might be coming of as an AMD fanboy, so hold your horses. I am an AMD fan. Not a fanboy. It doesn't take an Einstein to know which among the X299 and AM4 is more important and which among the X299 and X399 is more successful.DanNeely - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link
Mobo Reviewer A is doing all of the x299 boards in a single giant batch.Mobo Reviewer B is doing all of the AM4 boards in a single giant batch.
The selection of boards they get to review come down to what manufactures send as press samples. There're enough of those to keep all the reviewers busy full time so Anandtech rarely if ever buys retail boards to review.
There currently isn't an active Mobo Reviewer C, so any x399 samples that've been sent in are waiting until A or B clears his current backlog; or one of the other contributors clears out the backlog of what they're currently working on and can step in on mobos again. (eg E. Fylladitakis did a batch of mobos last summer between his keyboard and PSU reviews.)
Ket_MANIAC - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link
Quite alright but doesn't 16 X299 reviews seem to you as pointless? I don't know if you are representing Anandtech but if you are, don't you think more AM4 stuff would bring more readership to your website? You guys have the power to choose which boards you review among the ones that manufacturers send you and I don't think it is possible that Asus has never sent the Crosshair VI Hero or the VII Hero to you(from the CPU review, I see they had), ASRock never sent the X370 Taichi to you. Wouldn't reviewing these boards make more sense right now considering the 2000 series just launched?PeachNCream - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
It's another X299 MSI motherboard review, because we really need to hear more about MSI products since there are no other vendors out there that produce computer parts.