The MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard Review
by Ian Cutress on February 6, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- MSI
- X99
- X99A Gaming Pro Carbon
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
The X99A Gaming Pro has MCT enabled, along with a minor adjustment in the natural base frequency, leading to healthy scores in the LQ test which thrives on small frequency margins.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
The MSI board scores what we would expect for an MCT enabled product in WinRAR.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Whether it's the extra base frequency or the underlying software, but the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon scores almost 2% higher than any other X99 board in our single threaded 3DPM test. This translates into a good score in multithreaded as well.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high-end platforms.
Similar to 3DPM, the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon seems to get a good edge here.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Another performance win for the MSI. We double checked these numbers with another fresh OS and saw the same results.
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MarkieGcolor - Tuesday, February 7, 2017 - link
Or more pcie lanes from the cpu. I just bought an x79 and ivy bridge cpu for crossfire r9 nano and the improvement in games vs z97 and i7 is drastic. Tested with 4 ivy bridge cores and 6. 4 was a great improvement and 6 even better.fanofanand - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
Typo Ian?"On the LED side, the four zones on the board are coming trolled through the bundled software."
Conclusion page.
ddriver - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
LOL coming trolled instead of controlled. How and why does such a mistake happen :Ddstarr3 - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
Sounds like autocorrect to me. Written on a tablet?LiviuTM - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
Intel Z170 chipset - are you sure? :)Gunbuster - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
For $300+ I expect at minimum 3 light up carbon fiber dragons. Up your game MSI!dstarr3 - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
God, this RGB LED On Everything phase is so achingly hideous. I can't wait for this to pass.BrokenCrayons - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
I felt the same way about glossy plastic on laptops. It's likely there aren't many years left for the RGB fad. A lot of companies have gotten into it and they're naturally going to have to seek out other ways to differentiate products in the near future to attract customers. The good news is that if you're on pre-RGB hardware that's relatively modern, there aren't too many compelling reasons to upgrade outside of a picking up a modern GPU if gaming is your thing.wsjudd - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
The 'deep dive' link on the first page links to the Z170 deep dive, not the X99 one :-)brucek2 - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
I remember when the Macintosh first came out. For regular users, it was their introduction to fonts and being able to easily choose among them. There was a year or two there were it seemed like any printed page would have 5+ fonts on it.I'm hoping this lit up PC components phase goes the same way. Double or triple for components that are generally hidden within a case.