MSI X79A-GD45 Plus Review: Building Up

2014 Test Setup

For 2014, the motherboard section has an upgrade in terms of testing hardware and benchmarks.  The most significant upgrade for the test bed is on the GPU side, where we are moving from a pair of ECS GTX 580 GPUs to a trio of MSI GTX 770 Lightning models.  We would like to thank MSI for this upgrade, which stands to be part of the motherboard test bed for several years to come.

The MSI GTX 770 Lightning is one of the fastest GTX 770 models available, being PCIe 3.0 compatible, having 1536 CUDA Cores at 1150 MHz (Boost 1202 MHz) and 2GB GDDR5 memory at 1750 MHz.  Each card has two DVI outputs, a HDMI 1.4a and a DisplayPort 1.2.  The card also has a GPU Reactor on the rear to help with overclocking by providing a cleaner power supply, and retails for ~$480.

More information can be found in Ryan’s MSI GTX 770 Lightning review.

Also in our testing, we are implementing 1080p for the gaming benchmarks, switching down from 2560x1440 due to popular request.  The benchmark suite is also being updated, including the following new tests:

Adobe Effects CS6
Agisoft Photoscan 1.0
Handbrake v0.9.9
Dolphin Emulator Benchmark

All the other benchmarks included are either the same as previous, or updated to the latest version of the software to take advantage of any performance enhancements.

On the GPU side, the following games are now tested at 1080p maximum settings:

F1 2013
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider
Bioshock Infinite
Company of Heroes 2

Both F1 2013 and CoH 2 unfortunately do not scale beyond a single GPU, and we are still working on a BF4 benchmark which was unfortunately not ready for this review; however it looks like the rail run at the beginning of the Tashgar mission will be used in future.

Other changes include the power testing, which will focus on a single GTX 770, and the POST time which will (after this review) also be with a single GTX 770 installed to gain parity between smaller form factor motherboards.  Unfortunately this means that a lot of our older results are no longer valid for this review, and we have included the results of a number of future reviews to provide comparison points.

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:

Thank you to OCZ for providing us with 1250W Gold Power Supplies and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill and ADATA for providing us with memory kits.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU, Corsair H80i CLC and 16GB 2400C10 memory.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD HD7970 GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with the 500W Platinum Power Supply for mITX testing, BlackHawk Ultra, and 1600W Hercules PSU for extreme dual CPU + quad GPU testing, and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with the 802.11ac wireless router for testing.

Test Setup

Power Consumption

Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual AMD HD 7970 configuration.  This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading.  This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency.  These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.

While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers.  These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.

Due to our limited testing of the 2014 suite, it was perhaps obvious that the 4960X platform would draw more power than either the i7-4770K or A10-7850K platforms.

Windows 7 POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized.  A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized).  As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading.  (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.)  These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.

The POST time of the MSI was longer than expected, coming last in our comparison to the other X79 boards we have tested with Ivy Bridge-E.