MSI X79A-GD45 Plus Review: Building Up
by Ian Cutress on February 14, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- X79
MSI X79A-GD45 Plus In The Box
A $250 package in the Z87 arena would/should be numerate in its extras and offer the user something extra. In the X79 space, $250 is rather low on the radar – not the lowest, but there are motherboards that cost over $500 that go all out on the feature set. There is scope for MSI to do something good here.
With the X79A-GD45 Plus we get:
Rear IO Panel
Driver DVD
Manuals
Six SATA Cables
Flexi SLI Bridge
Along the line of few additional controllers on board, the MSI package also lacks any significant additions. Having a full complement of SATA cables is probably a good thing, although having a second SLI cable for multi-GPU allocations might help, given X79 is the focus for >2 GPU setups.
MSI X79A-GD45 Plus Overclocking
Experience with MSI X79A-GD45 Plus
To begin with, all was not well with the X79A-GD45 Plus. The OC Genie button does not seem to do anything from default. The motherboard, when XMP is applied, gives MultiCore Turbo (top turbo when all cores are loaded), and it seems OC Genie does the same thing when XMP is not applied. I expected at least a 4.2 GHz jump here when I tested.
For manual overclocking, our main limiting factor here is more our Ivy Bridge-E CPU sample than anything else. Like the other Ivy Bridge-E refresh motherboards we have reviewed, our limit was around 4.4 – 4.5 GHz, the main issue being OCCT stability before the temperature of the CPU rose above suitable levels.
Methodology:
Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with PovRay and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.
For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.
Manual Overclock:
Our overclock results were as follows:
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flemeister - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
Why? It still gets used occasionally, and it hardly takes up any room on the motherboard, unlike the old floppy and IDE headers.SirKnobsworth - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
Would I be correct in saying that only 3 of the secondary (2.0) PCIe lanes are being used? The PCH provides 8, but I only see one x1 slot, one NIC, and one USB 3 controller. At the very least they could have swapped the x1 slot for an x4 slot, allowing a high performance SSD to be installed.0xc000005 - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
This is a great board, bought one at work and it is excellent. The only letdown is that there are no drivers for windows server operating systems.Gigaplex - Sunday, February 16, 2014 - link
Considering it's using off the shelf chips that don't require special drivers, there should be no problem getting Windows Server working on it. Just don't expect them from MSIs website.Achaios - Sunday, February 16, 2014 - link
This "military class" thing is annoying.I wonder how well would this mobo fare under 5g stress, or say, after 5 days of a typical anti-guerilla mission mounted on an armoured vehicle moving through mountainous terrain/and/or cross country.
Or for instance, how well would it fare mounted on a PC onboard a Naval vessel after said vessel put its engines on "crash full astern" after making 30-35 knots on full ahead. Would this motherboard be able to withstand the excessive vibration produced by the engines of the said Naval Vessel? If not, what is the point of calling it "military class"?
AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link
Marketing. :-)AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link
I haven't played with Xeons for a while so I don't recall if Intel locks the Xeons in the factory, but assuming that this board can take it, what do you think the overclocking potential is for one of the oh-so-expensively-priced E5-2697 v2s are?mapesdhs - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
XEONs are indeed locked, so the only oc'ing possible is via strapsand the limited potential of a base clock increase. In this respect,
it's easier to mess about with X58 XEONs (still locked, but oc'ing
was mostly via bclk anyway).
Ian.
mapesdhs - Monday, February 17, 2014 - link
Ian, re the SATA3 ports that are part of Intel's X79 chipset, do you know if
Intel makes a SATA3 RAID or JBOD card which uses the same circuitry
which drives their X79 SATA3 ports? Or does any other company make such
a thing based on Intel's SATA3 technology? On X79 boards which only have
a Marvell chip (terrible controller) for additional SATA3, it would be great to
be able to add a PCIe card that provided the same functionality as a full set
of proper Intel SATA3 ports. I have an ASUS P9X79 WS, specced up the wazoo:
http://valid.canardpc.com/zk69q8
but the only thing which really lets it down is the limited number of Intel SATA3
ports (ie. 2).
Ian.
Morcrist - Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - link
Is it just me, or does the author completely miss the fact that this board supports 128 GB of ram?I mean, it kinda' threw me off at first when on the first page he alternately refers to the board as a GD45 and a GD65. I thought maybe the 'GD65' only supported the 64 GB.
But no, every image in the article has GD45 on it so...
WTF?