MSI X99A XPOWER AC Review

X99 Motherboard Test Setup

We use the same hardware to test all LGA2011-v3 motherboards. Due to the GPU-limited nature of many of today's games, we now use two AMD R9 290 graphics cards to allow CPU performance, in particular once it's overclocked, to come into play. AMD and XFX graciously provided two of their R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition graphics cards, which should prevent the GPUs from throttling when under load.


As many LGA2011-v3 systems will sport multiple GPUs, this is also representative system given the extra PCI-E lanes provided by Haswell-E CPUs over their LGA1150 counterparts. As such, we also use Intel's Core i7-5960X, which has the full complement of PCI-E lanes available to run both GPUs at x16 speed. Thanks to Intel for supplying the CPU, Corsair for the DDR4 memory, PSU and cooler, XFX for the graphics cards, Samsung, Crucial and Plextor for the SSDs and of course ASRock for providing our motherboard sample.

• 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM
  
• Intel Core i7-5960X
  
• 2 x XFX R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition
  
• 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD, Samsung 850 Pro, Plextor M.2 PX-G256M6e (SATA 6Gbps speed tests)
  
• Corsair H100i cooler
  
• Corsair AX860i PSU
  
• Windows 7 SP1

Thanks to Corsair for supplying the PSU, memory and CPU cooler, to Crucial and Samsung for the SSDs, to Intel for the CPU and to XFX for the graphics cards. Also, we'd like to thank ASRock for providing our review sample.

Tests:

• PCMark 8 Video 4K encoding
  
• PCMark 8 Photo Editing
  
• Cinebench R15
  
• Terragen 3
  
• Bioshock Infinite
  
• Battlefield 4
  
• SATA 6Gbps and M.2
  
• Rightmark Audio Analyser
  
• Power consumption