PCI Express Scaling Game Performance Analysis review

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Product Showcase Test Setup

For this test we will be using the MSI XPower 9 AC motherboard,  it allows us to select the three different generation PCIE bus modes. It also has a bucket-load of PCIe slots and we can arm it with plenty of generation 3.0 PCIE lanes thanks to a Core i7 5960X processor.

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This MSI X99S XPower 9 AC will come with nice PC options like five PCI-Express x16 slots yet it allows us to select PCIe Gen 1.1/2.0 or 3.0 per slot. A gorgeous motherboard of course. There is an extra EMI shield that covers the rear-panel I/O on-board, and audio is shielded as well. The board comes with an Intel Gigabit NICs and super fast 802.11 AC Wireless LAN. Ehm aah yeah, this is not a motherboard review ;)


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Storage wise you will get ten SATA 6 Gb/s and of course an M.2 slot (PCIe x4 linked this HEAPS of bandwidth). Overclocking features include voltage measurement points, and a diagnostic POST LED display. Other keywords for this product are V-Check Points 2, OC Engine, Military Class IV components, SATA Express and M.2 interface and intricate Audio Boost 2 technology. 

 

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Our test system is based on the eight-core Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition with Haswell-E based setup on the X99 chipset platform, it has a full 40 PCIe lanes to play around with. With this setup we overclock all 8-cores to 4.40 GHz to make sure our processor is not a bottleneck whatsoever. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). Memory wise we enable 2133 MHz quad-channel memory, so that won't be a bottleneck either. We use Windows 8.1 all patched up. Each card runs on the same PC with the same operating system clone.

  • GeForce cards use the latest 347.52 driver.
Again, our test rig was outfitted with this heavy setup to prevent and remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end GPU scores and well the fact that we can select PCIe slot Generation in the BIOS helps as well ;)

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