The X99 SLI Plus is the cheapest board in this test, although its £160 price is still high compared to many boards for cheaper and older platforms – a problem of buying new enthusiast-level technology so close to launch. The name suggests that this board concentrates on multi-GPU setups, and that’s true to a point. But, as with MSI’s more expensive Gaming 7 board, while the SLI Plus can technically support four graphics cards, you could only install three cards with dual-slot coolers.
Of course, harnessing the power of three graphics cards is an effective use of Haswell-E’s 40 PCI-E 3 lanes, but every other manufacturer offers support for quad SLI with four dual-slot cards on its boards.
Other areas are more generous. There’s support for 128GB of DDR4 RAM – double the amount that can be accommodated by some other boards – and ten SATA 6Gbps ports are as many as you’ll find on boards that cost twice this much. As with MSI’s more expensive board, the SLI Plus also includes both M.2 and SATA Express connectors.
Meanwhile, the bottom edge of the board houses the familiar power, reset and OC Genie buttons. Some other enthusiast features have been trimmed from the SLI Plus though – there’s no POST display, and no extra power sockets for either the CPU or PCI-E slots. Most of the other boards in this test include at least one such socket.
The SLI Plus is the plainest-looking board in the Labs too. Its black PCB and heatsinks aren’t augmented with any colours, and there isn’t any extravagant lighting either. At least it isn’t cramped. The single heatsink and absence of heatpipes at the top of the board means there’s less chance of large coolers getting obstructed, and the several right-angled connectors aid cable routing too, while the fan headers are sensibly installed around the edges.
The X99S SLI Plus might be the cheapest board in this test, but in our trio of application benchmarks, it came in second or third place, outpacing a couple of more expensive rivals. This board also equalled the MSI Gaming 7’s table-topping score in Cinebench, and the two MSI boards stuck together in our gaming tests, with a great performance in Shogun 2.
The SLI Plus began to slip down the ranking when we overclocked it though. As with most of this month’s boards, our test i7-5960X would only remain stable at 4.2GHz, but we had to use a 1.287V vcore – the highest amount of electricity we had to use for any board that would only overclock to 4.2GHz.
Like the other MSI board on test, the X99S SLI Plus also slipped down the performance rankings in our application benchmarks when it was overclocked, with other boards able to extract greater performance improvements from the same overclock. The same was true in the Shogun test, where the SLI Plus lost ground to rivals. Power consumption wasn’t great, being unremarkable when idle, and high when running under load – its total system power draw of 414W when overclocked was a good 46W more than the EVGA in the same test, thanks to the high vcore required.
The MSI X99S SLI Plus includes some good features for its price, but the extra voltage needed for a stable overclock, plus the lack of some notable enthusiast features, means it isn’t a worthwhile buy if you’re an enthusiast who wants to tweak Haswell-E – if that’s you, MSI’s Gaming 7 is a better option.
If you don’t want to overclock your chip to the limits, and don’t need enthusiast features, though, the X99 SLI Plus offers a good entry into the Haswell-E world that doesn’t cost the earth. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
A good money-saving option if you don’t need the enthusiast features or overclocking abilities available elsewhere.
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 ALC892 8-channel
Networking 1 x Intel Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 90.9–300MHz, CPU multiplier 12-80x; max voltages, CPU 2.1V
Ports 10 x SATA 6Gbps (X99), 1 x M.2, 1 x SATA Express, 8 x USB 3, 1 x LAN, 3 x audio out, line-in, mic, 1 x PS/2, 1 x optical S/PDIF
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244