MSI X79A-GD45 Plus Review: Building Up
by Ian Cutress on February 14, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- X79
Gaming Benchmarks
F1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings for a single GPU, as using multiple GPUs seems to have no scaling effect.
| F1 2013, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
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| Minimum Frame Rates |
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While there is no real scaling with multiple GPUs on F1 2013, having extra cores or PCIe lanes helps when more GPUs are in the system, even on minimum frame rates.
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Bioshock Infinite, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates |
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| Minimum Frame Rates |
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Bioshock seems to prefer IPC over cores, so Haswell takes the lead here on both dual card AMD and NVIDIA.
Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Tomb Raider, 1080p Max | ||
| NVIDIA | AMD | |
| Average Frame Rates |
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| Minimum Frame Rates |
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Tomb Raider seems rather unaffected by cores, MHz or lane allocations.
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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?