Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our run through on the MSI X99 SLI Plus motherboard. It’s now conclusion time and we’re eager to share a complete thoughts on the board and what it truly offers. Below is a quick breakdown of different aspect of the board. We also then have a quick overall with everything considered.
Design
No doubt the design on this board is certain to get some attention. MSI didn’t pick a colour scheme to go with and simply decided no color was best. The complete Black design is pretty epic. We have seen all Black designs before, but it’s nice to see MSI took it seriously and kept the dimm slots and PCIe slots the same shade of Black as well. Not everyone is going to love an all Black design, as design is very much a personal preference. That being said; Black is neutral and wont stand out or affect any color scheme you choose for your rig. We can see a lot of complete black builds using this board. We can’t fault MSI. They made a great looking board that defienetly goes beyond it’s £160 price point.
Features
The board doesn’t come with any outstanding features, but we are seeing the inclusion of an M.2 slot with up to 32GB/s speed. We also have triple SLI and triple Crossfire support along for some good times. We aren’t seeing any substantial audio included with the board, which is typically a nice addition. It’s nowhere near a deal breaker.Again, the board doesn’t come with anything special, but we have 8 SATA 6Gb/s and a SATA Express connector, which can also give you two additional SATA 6Gb/s instead. The M.2 Slot, triple graphics card support. This board isn’t lacking in spec list, and again the price point is pretty solid for this type of offering.
Performance
The X99 platform is still pretty fresh, and we did have some issues with trying to overclock are RAM on the board. Without putting too much effort in, the aim is to see what we could do with a quick overclock and not to much tweaking to fine tune it. We put 1.350v into our 5960x and made it to 4.4GHz. We definrelty think we could have gotten the volts down slightly or even gone further with the overclock; we were completely stable at those volts and are RAM was running at 2,666MHz. The OC performance was pretty closely matched with the Asus Rampage V Extreme, but the slightly higher overclock on the CPU and RAM gave it the edge. Keep in mind that we’re dealing with a board that costs half the price.
Stock v stock we saw the MSI board take the lead most of the time, wish we have to emphasize the fact the MSI board is half the price of the Asus board. No doubt those looking to get the every drop of performance out of their hardware are going to be looking for a more overclock heavy board. Regardless, the MSI didn’t disappoint.
Overall
The luanch of X99 and Haswell-E saw intel doing something they haven’t in some time. Their bottem SKU offering (5820K) brings a pretty substantial performance leap over the current mainstream offering (4770k/4790k). A 5820k offers an extra 2 cores, DDR4 support, and 28 over 16 PCIe lanes over the 4790k. The price difference is a measly £30. So the MSI board along with a 5820k would give you a massive jump in performance without much of a price increase.
We doubt anyone picking up a 5960x are going to be concerned with pricing of the board; the 5820k offers a good reason to jump to the X99 platform and the MSI board pretty much completes that offering by bringing all of those new features at a low enough price point that makes the X99 platform a no brainer. It’s clear that MSI are’t aiming the X99 SLI Plus at the top tier level, but rather want to offer those looking to get the new features with Haswell-E at a price point that makes sense. The MSI X99 SLI Plus offers the extreme platform without the extreme pricing. It includes all of the main features one would want from X99 and does it with a beautiful design and unbeatable price point
We couldn’t give the MSI X99 SLI Plus board anything other than Gold.
A big thanks to Tom and MSI for providing the X99 SLI Plus for Review.
9. Conclusion
