Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
The MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK motherboard has been a pleasure to work with from A to Z. it is easily the most enhanced and feature rich motherboard I have had the please to test. Tweaking out processor was done in seconds and yeah all other variables just feel right. I do know that many of you do not like Killer NIC based implementations. The new E2400 series Gigabit jacks do seem to rock, so i have got to give Killer (Qualcomm Atheros) the credit they deserve. The new Killer based AC WIFI also was downright impressive, we locked in at 867 Mbit through a steel concrete floor, 10 meters away from the router. This was a very stable connection a the Killer WIFI solution seems to prevent retraining the connection, that 867 Mbit was constant. If your WIFI continuously adapts wo other wifi modes / bandwidth, that could cause more lag. So yeah i am impressed with the Killer implementation, but also understand that many of you would much rather have an Intel NIC. Overall the MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK is just a wonderful motherboard and really has it all including some terrific looks with the black red design and the fully configurable RGB LED lighting system, which in case you missed it we have a small video on here:
The looks are of course a little personal as I am a sucker for the all matte black and red design in combo with LED configuration. Add to that the RAW horsepower a Haswell-E platform delivers. Yeah, its cool stuff alright. Specs and features wise there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be the infrastructure for you 2/3/4-way SLI or Crossfire freak-fest. What more would you need? Well, you will receive that excellent AC WIFI, no less then ten 6 Gbps SATA 3 ports and that new M.2 interface this round on a 32 Gbps link. Then a hideous amount of USB 3.0 ports are included as well as two 3.1 USB jacks, of course we need to mention the enhanced audio solution as well. Interesting to see is the preamp stuff for external DACs. I really do have to complement the audio features here, as over the standard realtek codec used like two years ago, we now see huge improvement on both hard and software side that is way more appealing to the audiophile.
The Haswell-E Platform Experience
The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014/2015 has to be the best years of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice but is at the level of pretty much any previous Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.5 GHz per core for the Core i7 5960X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E will make nice difference. Added to that, quad-channel DDR4 memory will offer retarded bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes and you'll have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus. With this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great lengths and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really. The latest iteration of the MSI Click BIOS uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. Apply a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4400 MHz range with a 5960X fast enough.
Storage
Combined with ten SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly complain about anything. Interesting I find to be the developments on the M.2 interface, pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 700/800 Mb/sec range. Overall your SATA and M.2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance. Great to see is that the slow has obtained a x4 PCIe interface connection allowing it 32 Gbps of bandwidth to work in. To compare a little, your SATA3 port has 6 Gbps available ;) So that small form factor SSD solution now is very future proof.
Aesthetics
Taste differ per person, but admittedly we do totally like the way the MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK looks. The black and red color schema combined with the nicely designs heatsinks, the RGB LEDs and the extra shielding. Yeah, it is just an intriguing product to look at really. Just sheer awesomeness in a dark PC case. The LEDs create an awesome HALO coming from under the shielding, it makes the motherboard pop out of your system. Well visually that is. The PCB is extremely dark as it has received a proper coated layer, including the dark connectors, dark capacitors, with the subtle heatsinks this rocks my boat. This is just a great looking solution for the enthusiast PC gamer.
Tweaking
If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking then just press the OC Genie II button, power up and after a few seconds your motherboard will all of the sudden be mildly overclocked, a performance boost at very little extra power consumption as the CPU will now be throttled to 3800 MHz; admittedly a bit low. The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected. Realistically at 1.30 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 5960X at roughly 4400~4500 MHz on all cores. We need 1.375~1.40 Volts for that. And even though that seems a little shy, it remains to be 4400 MHz on 8 physical CPU cores, the performance is seriously grand. Now I heard from others that they have been able to reach 4.5 GHz on all 8-cored with just a 1.25v Vcore. Some clock great on low voltages, other behave like a pig, in our case where we needed 1.4 Volts to reach 4.4 GHz and have gotten the pig. Regardless, overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, contrary the this board was designed to offer all features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise.
Final Words
We have tested a lot of X99 motherboards to date already, truth told .. they all perform roughly the same and they all overclock roughly the same if you stick to a consumer grade cooler like an AIO liquid cooling kit. It is the rest that matters and diversifies the product, and MSI is doing such a good job in that respect. Combined with a very energy friendly and feature rich X99 chipset these platforms will kick the proverbial ass big-time. The MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK offers everything, the great looks and features, like the ten SATA 6 Gbps ports, the KillerNIC Ethernet jacks and the 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec and headphone DAC. The reality is that we just started features wise, in conjunction with an amplifier you get support for quality headphones that have an impedance of up to 600 Ohms. The Realtek ALC1150 codec is covered by an EMI shield, and the part of the PCB where the audio hardware is located is isolated to prevent interference. Special caps will prevent noise and so on. The motherboard is multi-GPU up-to 2/3/4 way SLI/Crossfire ready. Then add to all this features like on-board buttons, pre-overclock modes and diagnostic LEDs, fantastic design and configurable RGB LED lit heatsinks and yeah, you will definitely have something in your PC that offers a great infrastructure, whilst looking amazing.The list still goes on though, as the board provides everything you need from an enthusiast class Haswell-E processor platform, in terms of features, multi-GPU support, USB 3.1, SATA3, PCI-E Gen 3.0, ease of tweaking and sure, the design and component selection. If there ever was a product deserving a Top pick Award, it has to be the MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK. I have very little to comment or complain about, except maybe pricing. But that pricing hasn't been set just yet as the product will become available next week. I do think we are talking 400 USD here.
The MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK comes with everything you can think of, including terrific AC Wireless LAN a superb audio solution and the looks that can be defined to kill. How can you not like this MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ACK unless it is based on a personal style preference ?
Check our other Haswell-E reviews:
- Core i7 5960X - 5930K and 5820K processor review
- ASUS X99 Deluxe Motherboard Review
- ASUS X99 Rampage V Extreme Review
- Gigabyte X99 SOC Force Motherboard Review
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