The MSI X99S Gaming 7 is half the price of the Asus Rampage V Xtreme, but it’s almost as goodlooking. It has a similar red and black theme, with black heatsinks banded with red metal, while a glowing MSI Gaming Series is illuminated on the chipset heatsink.
It’s a good start, and the Gaming 7 ticks most of the basic boxes too. It supports up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM, which is twice the capacity of some rival boards, and it has ten SATA 6Gbps ports, a SATA Express port and one M.2 connector – a storage specification that’s on a par with much more expensive products. As usual, using the M.2 socket knocks out a couple of SATA ports.
The I/O isn’t bad either. Eight USB 3 ports is two more than the Gigabyte offers, and elsewhere there’s a clear-CMOS button, a PS/2 port, five audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF connector. MSI has managed to make this board feel spacious too. There’s only one heatsink around the CPU socket, so there aren’t many chances for coolers to get obstructed, and many of the connectors are positioned near the board’s edges, with many installed at right angles.
The bottom edge also includes a couple of high-end features. MSI has found room in the budget for power and reset buttons, and a POST readout display sits nearby a button for MSI’s OC Genie. There’s one area where this gaming board falls behind many rivals, though, and that’s with its PCI-E slots – an area that we expected many manufacturers to exploit, given Haswell-E’s potential 40 PCI-E lanes. While this board technically supports four graphics cards, though, the layout of the 16x slots means you can only install three dual-slot cards. That’s only a consideration if you’re building a very highend gaming rig, but it’s worth bearing in mind.
This mid-range board punched above its weight in many of our benchmarks too. In our Shogun 2 gaming tests, for instance, its minimum and average frame rates of 32fps and 39fps are equal to those of the awardwinning Asus – a board that’s £140 more expensive. It performed well in application test too. It topped the results table in the three application benchmarks, which meant it was the fastest board overall. In Cinebench, it scored 1,396 – the same as the other MSI board, and the best result in the Labs.
We could only overclock our 5960X to 4.2GHz in the MSI – the same result as three other boards in this Labs, with only the Asus able to eke a stable 4.3GHz out of the chip. In the Gaming 7 we had to use a 1.263V vcore, which is a tad high – only the faster Asus, and the other MSI, required more voltage.
The MSI couldn’t maintain its great benchmark performance when overclocked, though, despite reaching the same frequency as most of its rivals. When overclocked, it dropped to mid-table in our application benchmarks, and in Cinebench too, although not by huge amounts.
Meanwhile, power consumption was a mixed bag. When idle at stock and overclocked speeds, the MSI was this month’s most efficient performer, but it consumed noticeably more power when running Prime95 – in this test, its total system power draw of 414W when overclocked was 25W more than the EVGA in the same test.
The Gaming 7 squares up to the Gigabyte when it comes to price, and it’s a better allround offering – it’s faster in most benchmarks, and has a better selection of features and a decent layout. If you’re in the market for a decent X99 motherboard that won’t break the bank, this is the board to buy. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
A well-balanced board that offers high-end features without a bank-breaking price.
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel X99
CPU socket Intel LGA2011-v3
Memory support 8 slots: max 128GB DDR4 (up to 3,333MHz overclocked)
Expansion slots Four 16x PCI-E 3, two 1x PCI-E 3
Sound Realtek ALC1150 8-channel
Networking 1 x Killer E2205 Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 90.9–300MHz, CPU multiplier 12-80x; max voltages, CPU 2.1V, RAM 2.8V
Ports 10 x SATA 6Gbps (X99), 1 x M.2, 1 x SATA Express, 8 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 1 x LAN, 3 x audio out, line-in, mic, 1 x PS/2, 1 x optical S/PDIF
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244