Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Really, I do not want to use the phrase "X-factor" in our reviews anymore but I guess we can all agree that the X99S XPower is precisely such a product. It has fantastic features and staggering looks. Now I know that looks are of course personal and thus subjective but I very much like what MSI has done here with the dark black and subtle usage of yellow. Combined with the white LEDs located at the backside of the PCB, creating a halo of light surrounding the motherboard while it sits inside a chassis with a see-through window, can you imagine what that looks like? Add to that the RAW horsepower a Haswell-E platform delivers with the 6 and 8-core processor and DDR4 memory. Yeah, its cool stuff alright. Specs and features wise there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be n excellent infrastructure for your 2/3/4-way SLI or Crossfire build. Then there are the extra's like AC WIFI, WIDI, no less than ten 10 Gbps SATA 3 ports and that all new M.2 interface this round on a 32 Gbps link making sure that the future M.2. devices have plenty of bandwidth to operate in. Then the amount of USB 3.0 ports that are included is massive, and of course we need to mention the enhanced audio solution as well. Interesting to see is the preamp stuff for external DACs. I really do have to complement the audio features here, as over the standard realtek codec used like two years ago, we now see huge improvement on both hard and software side that is way more appealing to the audiophile. The Gigabit Ethernet jacks are based on Intel so that's all good as well. 

The Platform Experience

The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice but is at the level of pretty much any previous Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.5 GHz per core for the Core i7 5960X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E will make nice difference. Added to that, quad-channel DDR4 memory will offer retarded bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes and you'll have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus. With this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great lengths and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really. The latest iteration of the MSI Click BIOS uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. Apply a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4300~4500 MHz range with a 5960X fairly enough. 

Storage

Combined with ten SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly complain about anything. SATA Express is supported, but I foresee that'll be a dead ship in the water. More interesting I find to be the all new M.2 interface, pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 700/800 Mb/sec range. Overall your SATA and M.2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance. Great to see is that the slot has obtained a x4 PCIe interface connection allowing it 32 Gbps of bandwidth to work in. To compare a little, your preferred SSD SATA3 port has 6 Gbps available ;) So that small form factor SSD solution now is very future proof. 

Aesthetics

Taste differ per person, but admittedly we do totally like the way the XPower AC looks, just terrific. The black and yellow color scheme combined with the nicely designed heatsinks, the LEDs and the extra shielding. Yeah, it is just an intriguing product to look at really. Just sheer awesomeness in a dark PC case. The LEDs create an awesome HALO coming from underneath the motherboard, it makes the motherboard pop out of your system. Well visually that is. The PCB is extremely dark as it has received a proper coated layer, including the dark connectors, dark capacitors, with the subtle heatsinks this rocks my boat. This is just a great looking solution for the enthusiast PC gamer. And of course if you pair it with a HAWK or Lightning based graphics card, it would look perfect as these have the very same black/yellow design.

Tweaking

If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking then just press the OC Genie II button, power up and after a few seconds your motherboard will all of the sudden be mildly overclocked, a performance boost at very little extra power consumption as the CPU will now be throttled to 3800 MHz or set the selective stages and you can OC up-to 130% of the Turbo clock automatically. The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected. Realistically at 1.30 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 5960X at roughly 4400 MHz on all cores. We need close to 1.40 Volts for that. And even though that seems a little shy, it remains to be 4400 MHz on 8 physical CPU cores, the performance is huge. Others have been able to reach 4.5 GHz on all 8-cores with just a 1.25v Vcore. Some CPUs clock great on low voltages, other behave like a pig, in our case where we needed 1.375 Volts to reach 4.4 GHz and yes, we have gotten the pig. Regardless, overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with as the XPower certainly isn't the limiting factor. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, on the contrary this board was designed to offer all the features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise. 

Final Words

Handy related downloads: 

• • Prime95
  • SiSoft Sandra
  • AIDA
  • CPU-Z
  • HWMonitor
    
    
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