MSI 970 Gaming Review

Performance Analysis

Despite a promising start, the 970 Gaming languished at the bottom of both the video encoding and multi-tasking tests, but never by significant margins. This meant overall it was less than 70 points behind the top scoring Crosshair V Formula, which managed 1,563.

As it's been so long since we looked at an AMD board, we don't have any comparison gaming numbers with our current benchmarks, but as you can see in the graphs, overclocking these CPUs is definitely worth it. there was a near 10 per cent boost to the minimum frame rate in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the Total War CPU test lept over 20 per cent.


The MSI 970 Gaming also posted the fastest read speed we've seen from a SATA 6Gbps-enabled motherboard at 546MB/sec, although the write speed was somewhat slower, losing over 30MB/sec to many Intel Z97 motherboards. Our audio tests revealed some shortcomings of the on-board audio, however we don't have any comparison numbers with other AMD boards at the present time - we'll be adding these in as we go.

As per usual, the downside to overclocking an AMD system is the large increases in power consumption that go with it. The load power consumption spiked at 484W compared to 136W under load, but this is the same with all Socket AM3+ boards we've looked at.

Conclusion

The 970 Gaming put in some solid benchmark results and despite a few hiccups, namely the very average on-board audio and poor SATA 6Gbps write speed, did manage to overclock out test CPU to 4.6GHz, which isn't bad at all for a £70 motherboard. What's more, the extra cooling certainly seemed to be dealing with the heat, as the VRM heatsink got pretty toasty under load, so we'd feel more comfortable using a high overclock here on a regular basis than on a sparsely-cooled motherboard.

There are a few things to be aware of, though. The EFI isn't quite as slick as some of Asus' more expensive offerings, not to mention MSI's Z97 equivalents too, with some occasional lag and awkward inputs being the most noticeable quirks. However, it recovered well for the most part from overzealous overclocks. There's also a few issues with the layout and the lack of any meaningful extras, although that's probably because we've been reviewing a lot of £100-150 examples recently. If you're not intending to overclock your CPU then there are cheaper options out there but if your target is 4.5GHz+ then MSI 970 Gaming should definitely be on your shortlist.