Final Words & Conclusion
Final words & conclusion
The MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK is a downright sexy looking motherboard, and hey it has all the right features as well. The point shielding design is a bit trivial and will not be for everybody, but there are plenty of other models to choose from of course. Also what I like very much is that MSI didn't go over the TOP with RGB LEDs, at default they kick in at a static red color and from there onward you can configure things the way you prefer them to be. I also really like the metal shielding on the PCI and DIMM slots. hey it better be, as this puppy sits in the sub €399,- / USD domain pricing wise. This price varies a bit per country of course. We very much like the AC WIFI implementation, it works out really well. And while I have no problem with the Killer Gigabit Ethernet jack, I do feel that in this price range a 5/10 Gbps Ethernet jack (Aquantia) should have been the default. Overall the Gaming M7 ACK offers pretty much what the X299 chipset can push, but that still is fairly feature-rich and being MSI, this is a well-designed motherboard. In this price category it would have been nice to see a third M2 slot much like some competition is doing. But sure, with the two M.2 slots you are covered and can go RAID with them as well.
Performance
With the current BIOS firmware the processor temps remain trivial, at 75~80 Degrees C under full load conditions. MSI is bypassing the Intel recommended p-state spec as you can observe from power consumption levels. Intel right now tries to enforce a processor power state that keeps energy power consumption of the a bit more in line. With most synthetic benchmarks you will not notice huge perf differences. However the lower per core clocks and voltage states have a tremendous negative effect on game performance (in our experience). Once the motherboard manufacturers will disable this 'feature' or if you manually set the CPU Ratios in the BIOS, that P state changes and your game performance jumps up, back to normal and expected levels including games. However, your power consumption will now jump up as well as the temperature, both to the levels as seen in the original 7900X review.
Tweaking
Depending on choice of cooling, temperatures when the CPU is overclocked with added voltage, you are in for a challenge when compared to the last-gen Broadwell-E procs. Realistically if you already are on that or a Haswell-E platform, really there's little to get excited about upgrade wise. At the OC level you are looking at up-to 1.30~1.35V needed on that CPU core (depending on your frequency target and number of tweaked cores). Tweaking wise the infrastructure that X299 offers is easy to use, you increase the CPU voltage and multiplier and you are good to go. With a Core i9 7900X and a good LCS (liquid cooling) kit you can achieve roughly 4700~4800 MHz. For memory the sky is the limit as the Intel platform is that over the years they have been able to refine their memory controllers, pop in anything XMP 2.0 and you have a 90% chance it'll work straight out of the box with very fast memories. However, the effect of fast clocked memory is far less significant for Intel opposed to AMD Ryzen. Also with quad-channel memory available as an option, we'd always suggest to go with a more affordable 2677 MHz kit, as bandwidth on quad-channel simply is not relevant to your gaming experience. You are better off with more memory. Voltage wise we can recommend you to leave that CPU voltage at 'auto', this got us towards 4700 stable and keeps the temps in-line at sub-90 degrees C (if you can call that in-line). BTW you will need some sort of liquid cooling as the 10 cores heat up pretty badly once you tweak.
Power consumption
Depending on the hardware p-state the motherboard is fitted with, your numbers will be all over the place. So, with ten cores you get a 140 Watt TDP processor. With the system at idle with a GeForce GTX 1080 installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the X299 motherboard I hovered at roughly 75 Watts in IDLE. That's just fine really, the load values are however significant. When we stressed the processor in a 100% run we reach roughly 350 Watts with this is a ten core part (it was a Prime 1024M stress test though). So, we go from 90 Watts towards 320 Watts. When we game we hover at 360 Watts with the GeForce GTX 1080, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of graphics card and even game you use of course and, sure keep in mind, most games certainly do not utilize the ten CPU cores.
PCI-Express 3.0
We quickly have to discuss PCI-Express lanes, as honestly here is Intel just goofing up. Here is the breakdown:
- Kaby Lake-X quad core gets 16 PCI-Express Lanes 3.0
- Skylake-X six and eight core procs get 28 PCI-Express Lanes 3.0
- Skylake-X ten core procs get 44 PCI-Express Lanes 3.0
DDR4 Memory
Ever since Haswell-E was released along came DDR4 memory. With Skylake-X DDR4 may be clocked a notch faster at 2,677 MHz. Honestly, if you pick up some nice 2,133 MHz DIMMs, at quad-channel they'll offer more than plentiful bandwidth. A 3,200 MHz kit for example is far more expensive and does offer better bandwidth but the performance increases in real-world usage will be hard to find. Unless you transcode videos over the processor a lot. DDR4 mostly was released for lower voltages and higher frequencies. 2,133 MHz CL 14 or CL 15 memory in combo with quad-channel will already get you to 50~60 GB/sec. While impressive to observe for gaming you will not notice huge performance improvements with high memory bandwidth, but with content creation and video transcoding this kind of bandwidth certainly does make a difference. As always, my advice would be to go with lower clocked DDR4 memory with decent timings, but get more of it. Don't go for 8 GB, get four DIMMs and in total a minimum of 16 GB. And yeah, if you do not care about spending money, check the test page with the G.Skill RGB DIMMs at 3600 MHz, that is brilliant stuff though.
The bottom line
We are now in week three after Intel released the X299 / Core X platform. Slowly and steadily with new BIOS iterations I can see the power consumption overall drop a bit while the performance is going up a notch, at least for MSI. The M7 ACK is the fastest platform for the Core i9 7900X (thus far). So progress is made. It however will remain to be a daunting platform in terms of heat and power consumption with the many-core SKUs. Hardware wise you can hardly complain, hey when it comes to hardware MSI knows their stuff.
For tweaking, we feel ~4.6 GHz on all cores is the max on seriously proper liquid cooling. That is a step upwards from Broadwell-E (10-core 6950X), voltages/temps/power will be trivial but let's wait what new BIOS and firmware updates will do in terms of help there. Also, Intel allows per core tweaking, my advice would be to explore a little further, set say 4 cores at 4.8 GHz and the rest at 4.3 GHz. This might save you on power consumption, likely a lower voltage and thus the end result also is a processor that would run a bit cooler. It's just a tip though.
The MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK is a well designed and great looking motherboard, but everything in a PC is all about the symbiosis of all components, and thus this symbiosis (in this case the sum of all parts) can only be as good as the processor will allow it to be. Looking at purely the motherboard then it is all very simple, it is lovely and feature rich enough, has an a proper nice design and feel to it, combined with proper components. Features wise this kit offers many SATA 6 Gbps ports, the Killer Ethernet jack and the 7.1 channel HD audio. We absolutely like the AC WIFI, we miss 5 Gbit Ethernet anno 2017 though. MSI did not go over the top with RGB LEDs and did things subtle, I like that as well. Overall and purely speaking of the Gaming M7 ACK, you cannot be anything short from impressed and thus is easily recommended. However pricing seems steep, in the 399 Euro/USD range. personally I'd wait a little while until the initial BIOS and woes has passed though, the chipset need more refinement in firmware and processors are a challenge power and heat levels wise. you can lower the power and heat levels of course, but that will always have an effect on performance somewhere down the pipeline. It's going to be an interesting couple of months to see how things pan out on X299.
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