MSI X99A XPOWER AC Review

Performance Analysis

The majority of our tests delve into multi-threaded performance and here the X99A XPOWER AC put in a good, if not spectacular showing at stock speed, lacking a chart-topping performance. The hiccup came when we turned to the photo editing test and in our experience this can often be due to the BIOS, which in this case was a beta version not yet released on the MSI website.

Still, there was only a 10 percent difference between the X99A XPOWER AC's score and the top scorer on test and elsewhere it was mixing it up in the middle of the graphs, with the same being true of power consumption too. In fact, the board under load was considerably lower than many of the other high-end boards we've tested recently, despite the X99A XPOWER AC being an E-ATX monster, while the storage results were good too.


The onboard audio proved to be very capable indeed and second only to the Asus Sabertooth X99 and ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer with a noticeable advantage over the much cheaper boards we've tested such as the MSI X99S SLI Plus and Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4P.

Of course stock speed results are kind of irrelevant with a motherboard such as this and the lofty overclock did boost its standings in a number of tests. It was top in Battlefield 4, albeit by 1fps on the average frame rate and also managed the highest average frame rate in Bioshock Infinite too, while the minimum here was a little lower than the top result.


The video editing test was a tad disappointing as several other boards managed a marginally faster test time and again the result in the photo editing test was decidely poor - most likely down to an early BIOS geared towards overclocking. However Cinebench R15 was also a little slower than some of the other boards with slower overclocked speeds. As you might expect with such a high overclock, the power consumption was pretty high, with the X99A XPOWER AC drawing the highest idle power and one of the higher load powers too.

Conclusion

Using the MSI X99A XPOWER AC for a couple of days was great fun and it's a dab hand at overclocking to great heights either by tweaking dozens of settings or by just adjusting the usual culprits. It looks fantastic, has plenty of features and would serve any serious overclocker well. That said, there are definitely better options to be had for less money. Asus's X99 Deluxe costs a little less and is much more geared towards a normal system, while still boasting plenty of water-cooling and air cooling overclocking prowess.

However, you can't dismiss the MSI X99A XPOWER AC just because it focusses more on overclocking - it justifies its price in other ways that will undoubtedly be very useful to those more obsessed with benchmarking and sub zero temperatures than playing games or content creation. Thankfully the MSI X99A XPOWER AC can happily cope with all of those.