MSI X99S MPower Review

Performance Analysis

Given MSI has had a while to fine-tune its EFI and given the poor state everyone's were in at the start, it's not surprising to see some fairly nifty results at stock speed. It managed the fastest result in the PCMark 8 Photo Editing V2 test and matched the top result in the 4K Video Editing test too. The Asus X99 Deluxe just had the edge in Terragen 3 but the X99S MPower matched it again in Cinebench


Power consumption was the lowest we've seen at our usual test settings too - a good 7W lower at idle than the next best result and over 50W lower than Asus's X99 Deluxe under load, but then the latter is dripping with extra features. Once overclocked, the idle power remained fairly low but the load power of 443W was noticeably higher than some other boards on test, though still far from the highest.

The overclock didn't quite live up to expectations, but overall it was usually not far behind the Asus X99 Deluxe, which sported an identical overclock. However, both the MSI X99S SLI Plus and ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer, with their 50MHz core speed advantages were a little faster, gaining a few frames per second in Bioshock Infinite. That said, the X99S MPower still posted some competitive results in Terragen 3 and the PC Mark media tests.


The M.2 speeds were a little low on the read speed, but faster on the write speed than other boards we've tested so far, although that was the only anomaly. As expected, the audio performance was average, posting similar results to other bog-standard Realtek ALC1150-based motherboards such as the Gigabyte GA-X99-Gaming 5 and MSI X99S SLI Plus.

Conclusion

There are a few reasons to maybe prefer the MSI X99S MPower over similarly-priced offerings such as Gigabyte's GA-X99-Gaming 5. It has an excellent EFI, which makes overclocking a quick and pleasant experience, plus it has the full complement of overclocking tools including MSI's OC Genie automatic overclocking and on-board baseclock overclocking buttons as well.

Price-wise, things are pretty tight below £200. MSI's own X99S SLI Plus costs £20 less yet still manages to include Turbo M.2 and SATA Express plus it was good at overclocking too. Above this, Gigabyte's GA-X99-Gaming 5 has two M.2 ports, one more 1x PCI-E slot plus a mount for a WiFi aerial and perhaps more importantly, allows you to double-space two graphics cards for better cooling. A lot will likely come down to personal preference too, especially regarding the aesthetics, but the X99S MPower has plenty of overclocking potential and is one of the cheaper X99 motherboards we've tested. It's a solid effort then but doesn't quite blow your socks off, while Gigabyte's GA-X99-Gaming 5 might be better-suited to air-cooled multi-GPU setups.