MSI X99S Gaming 9 – MSI brings gaming to a new level!

Testing & Methodology

We’ve expanded our testing suite considerably since the X79 chipset release, and will continue to use the same methods for most of the motherboards and CPU’s we test. In the interests of thoroughness and accurate results, we run each test at least three times, and some tests more than that. We average the total of all the tests from each benchmark then report the average here.

The OS we use is Windows 7 Pro 64bit with all patches and updates applied. We also use the latest drivers available for the motherboard and any devices attached to the computer. We do not disable background tasks or tweak the OS or system in any way. We turn off drive indexing and daily defragging. We also turn off Prefetch and Superfetch. This is not an attempt to produce bigger benchmark numbers. Drive indexing and defragging can interfere with testing and produce confusing numbers. If a test were to be run while a drive was being indexed or defragged, and then the same test was later run when these processes were off, the two results would be contradictory and erroneous. As we cannot control when defragging and indexing occur precisely enough to guarantee that they won’t interfere with testing, we opt to disable the features entirely.

Prefetch tries to predict what users will load the next time they boot the machine by caching the relevant files and storing them for later use. We want to learn how the program runs without any of the files being cached, and we disable it so that each test run we do not have to clear pre-fetch to get accurate numbers. Lastly we disable Superfetch. Superfetch loads often-used programs into the memory. It is one of the reasons that Windows occupies so much memory. Vista fills the memory in an attempt to predict what users will load. Having one test run with files cached, and another test run with the files un-cached would result in inaccurate numbers. Again, since we can’t control its timings so precisely, it we turn it off. Because these four features can potentially interfere with benchmarking, and are out of our control, we disable them. We do not disable anything else.

One thing to note is that we are revamping our testing method in order to better represent motherboard performance and offering to you guys the consumer. Also we want to make it an easier read for you without miles of endless charts. Please feel free to provide feedback on what you think as many benchmarks will be shuffled or removed completely.

Test Rig

Test Suite

We will use the following applications to test the performance of the Motherboard, Processor

NOTE!  Due to the early nature of the platform we have seen some very strange results form the platform on some benchmarks and have been told that updates to the benchmarks will be made to make them more compatible so stay tuned for future board reviews for better idea on scoring

Overclocking

For overclocking I only had one sample this go around and I had a kind of pre warning from ASUS that the common clock is between 4.4-4.6 on air/water on these chips with some exceptional samples pulling 4.7GHz capable without going extreme cooling.

Here you can see our top clock with the gaming 9 which is the same as we saw with the ASUS X99 Deluxe board. The MSI board took slightly more voltage to reach top clocks but nto much more honestly. You can see the voltage scaling in the below chart and as the chip ramps up major going from 4.4 to 4.5GHz.

Here you can see a breakdown of the voltages applied to reach the  target speed, but do note that I cannot verify if the voltages will match every CPU only time will tell how well each chip scales with settings but if history has taught us anything its that CPUs can vary by alot so dont expect to just plug in my exact setting and run well, but maybe this will help give you a baseline to start from.

When testing memory overclocks we found that the Corsair 2666 Modules can do around 2800MHz at some decent timing settings on the ASUs board and they were similar oin the MSI board although I did find a strange bug with XMP where the MSI board would automatically raise the tRCD value by one which could hamper performance slightly and I will check with MSI on this to see if its just a firmware bug or why it happens.

Important note: Overclocking can cause component failure. Please exercise caution when attempting any level of overclock on system components.

Temperatures

The temperatures were recorded with RealTemp while running wPrime 1024 right before the end of the 5th run. The results were recorded carefully. After the results were recorded, we waited for 30 minutes before taking Idle temperature measurements. The results were as follows:

The Water 3.0 ultimate with it large surface area 360mm radiator keeps the CPU plenty cool.

PCmark 7

With Futuremark benchmarks it was a mess as the systeminfo would not load properly and would crash the system and even with disabling the system info the computation numbers simply did not fall into line so I am guessing something is amiss and I will update PCMark scores as the app is updated to support the new X99 series.

AIDA64

AIDA64 simply tests the memory and gives you raw input on performance for the memory bus and installed DIMMS. as you can see the new X99 platform with DDR4 can pull some massive bandwidth numbers but I was also a little shocked as to the high 70ns latency result. but it is worth noting that AIDA is getting constant updates and the bench as it stands takes up to a minute just to start so it is possible that once the software side is fixed this could be better. While the results are iffy I will mention that memory performance seems to be a bit lower from the MSI board but taht could also be due to the timing I saw being incorrectly set which could be cause performance loss.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a free program used for transcoding video files. For this we used a 4K video file and ran it down to 1080 while manually keeping count of the time it took to process this via the CPU. as you can see when compared to the 4960X the new 5960X jumps far ahead and even almost halves the time once overclocked. Do note that the extra 4 threads will definitely help with this as the program utilizes all cpu threads when running the encoding operation. The Gaming 9 does well and at stock is beaten slightly by the ASUS platform but at overclock the Gaming 9 edges out the ASUS.

3DMark 11

As mentioned before Systeminfo for Futuremark has a major issue and so it had to be disabled on the X99 but regardless it shows some slightly higher numbers in this 3D synthetic benchmark. Im sure some of that is due to the physics score and the extra threads at work. MSIs Gaming 9 does good work here but falls behind a bit and it may be due to small efficiency differences between the ASUS tuning and MSIs.

SuperPi

This tests single threaded performance and clock efficiency by processing digits of the number pi. Here you cann see that single threaded performance is not groundbreaking as it is beat out by the 4960X but I am very interested to see what a few BIOS updates will bring. As you can see even when overclocked the 4790K beats the 5960X so something I feel may be amiss here. The Gaming 9 once again leavs some performance on the table as it falls a bit short of the ASUS board but I am still going to say its a bit early in life for the platform to call this done as this could be as easy as a firmware to being it back to the top.

Wprime

WPrime is similar to Superpi, but is multi core aware and you can set the core count. The 5960X with its 16 processing threads makes easy work of Wprime and gets us close to a run in the 2 second range on teh 32M side when overclocked. The Gaming 9 trades blows with the ASUS Deluxe here beating it at stock and falling behind at overclock.

Cinebench R11.5

X264HD

Transcoding has become more popular now and the latest Sandy Bridge and on processors added support for AVX instruction for faster video transcoding. Here again the 5960X is proving itself to be a work horse in these heavy laoded tasks as it chews thru them and gives scores higher than we have seen come through our test bench for any consumer part to date. Once again the Gaming 9 is give and take as it gets some back and forth with one part of the benchmark on par or better and the next part being behind.

Truecrypt 7.1

TrueCrypt is a real world application that gives a good indication of the true performance of our latest processor. The AES capability helps push the performance higher in the encryption performance and the super high core count with overclock added gives us out first double digit result in truecrypt on a consumer part. as you can see the outgoing 4960X is easily beaten by 2GB/s stock vs stock which is a huge performance increase. The Gaming 9 once again at stock pulls a great score and at overclock holds dead even with ASUS this just shows that depending on baord tuning really changes performance in different scenarios.

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Unigine Heaven is a benchmark program based on Unigine Corp’s latest engine, Unigine. The engine features DirectX 11, Hardware tessellation, DirectCompute, and Shader Model 5.0. All of these new technologies combined with the ability to run each card through the same exact test means this benchmark should be in our arsenal for a long time.

Unigine Heaven on a discrete GTX 780 sees very similar performance as the 3.0 PCIe bus simply moves more than enough data at great efficiency that there is really no major advantage from extra threads here. The thread count and even overclock does little to help here as its simply outguunned by the gamers dream 4790K chip. Heaven for the Gaming 9 we see similar performance across the board as the GPU bus simply has so much bandwidcth I dont think its possible to bottleneck it.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 once again may be showing some of the performance issues we have seen as the performance simply falls off compared to the other results we have seen. the max FPS is normally well into the 150+ range yet on X99 it is in the 80’s and the average FPS is also 33% lower across teh board so we will eb digging into this further to find the issue.

Batman Arkham City

Batman Arkham City has been a staple of our benchmarking suite and its simply because its a fun game to play, its popular and offers many excellent technologies which puts a system to work. Here you can see that at stock the 4790K beats the average FPS against the X99 but when overclocked the X99 can pull ahead some but by the same token im sure the 4790K when overclocked could pull away some as well.

Sniper Elite V2

The Sniper Elite V2 shows similar scaling across the board offering well over playable FPS results but the X99 does not jump ahead in any way.