The MSI X299 XPower Gaming AC Review: Flagship Fantasy
by Joe Shields on May 9, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- i9-7900X
Gaming Performance
AoTS Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The original AoTS was released back in March of 2016 while the standalone expansion pack, Escalation, was released in November of 2016 adding more structures, maps, and units. We use this specific benchmark as it relies on both a good GPU as well as on the CPU in order to get the most frames per second. This balance is able to better display any system differences in gaming as opposed to a more GPU heavy title where the CPU and system don't matter quite as much. We use the default "Crazy" in-game settings using the DX11 rendering path in both 1080p and 4K UHD resolutions. The benchmark is run four times and the results averaged then plugged into the graph.
Our tight-knit AOTSe results find the XPower Gaming AC again above the middleputting up 44.1 FPS in our 1080p settings while averaging 35.2 in 4K UHD.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
Rise of the Tomb Raider also continues its close results with the MSI board putting out 93.7 FPS at 1080p and 40.3 FPS using 4K UHD resolution - the latter matching the highest FPS in 4K testing for ROTR.
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BPB - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Sigh, I guess I can always dream about owning such an expensive board. But I can't imagine anybody who is budget conscious or not rich buying one. I wonder how MSI and the others sell enough boards like this to justify making them.Achaios - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Unfortunately, the era of me dreaming of motherboards and CPU's passed long ago with no signs of returning. Nowadays, the only thing I usually dream of is East Asian fleshpots and lots and lots of ambitious girls in, out, on top and below. Do I miss the time my only interest in the world was my Pentium 4, my NVIDIA GO GPU with 128 megs of RAM and World of Warcraft? Sometimes yes but not really.WinterCharm - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Hands down the funniest comment I’ve read on here in a long time :)Ket_MANIAC - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
And another great X299 review. Expecting at least a dozen more such reviews and expecting no review for any AM4 boards or X470 boards at all because who buys cheap stuff. Come on guys, is it really that hard? People already blame you guys to being Intel shills and all and reviews such as these only add fuel to their talk. Not that the review is bad but what reason could you have for this megaload of X299 reviews?rsandru - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
Agreed, X299 is going to be replaced soon anyway so even for potential Intel HEDT buyers all those motherboards are most likely non starters... And this one still sports the tiny VRM heat sink that was repeatedly pointed out as being insufficient.To round this perfectly marketed product there’s the ‘gaming’ in the name, as if anyone whose main interest is playing games would pick an X299 platform over a Z370.
Peter2k - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
You'd be surprised how many gamers where absolutely convinced they need quad channel and a bazillion pcie-x lanes for that sweet sweet quad GPU setup they gonna have one day so that they don't throttle when using many M2 SSD'sMarketing must be doing a great job these days
Surprisingly it's the sort of same amount of gamers that don't know that quad GPU setups are dead
Quad channel doesn't do anything for gaming (or most use cases anyway)
Ehh
As long as there are LED's on it
Ket_MANIAC - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link
What I am baffled about is the lack of AM4 motherboard reviews from AnandTech. They are one of the few publications out here who do motherboard reviews right and just 6 reviews in over a year, out of which 3 are boards that no body ever buys when talking about AM4. Yes, they have covered a lot of Ryzen stuff lately. And motherboard reviews are generally not as important as CPU. But if that's the case, how do you justify "16" X299 reviews? And no X399? I might be coming of as an AMD fanboy, so hold your horses. I am an AMD fan. Not a fanboy. It doesn't take an Einstein to know which among the X299 and AM4 is more important and which among the X299 and X399 is more successful.DanNeely - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link
Mobo Reviewer A is doing all of the x299 boards in a single giant batch.Mobo Reviewer B is doing all of the AM4 boards in a single giant batch.
The selection of boards they get to review come down to what manufactures send as press samples. There're enough of those to keep all the reviewers busy full time so Anandtech rarely if ever buys retail boards to review.
There currently isn't an active Mobo Reviewer C, so any x399 samples that've been sent in are waiting until A or B clears his current backlog; or one of the other contributors clears out the backlog of what they're currently working on and can step in on mobos again. (eg E. Fylladitakis did a batch of mobos last summer between his keyboard and PSU reviews.)
Ket_MANIAC - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link
Quite alright but doesn't 16 X299 reviews seem to you as pointless? I don't know if you are representing Anandtech but if you are, don't you think more AM4 stuff would bring more readership to your website? You guys have the power to choose which boards you review among the ones that manufacturers send you and I don't think it is possible that Asus has never sent the Crosshair VI Hero or the VII Hero to you(from the CPU review, I see they had), ASRock never sent the X370 Taichi to you. Wouldn't reviewing these boards make more sense right now considering the 2000 series just launched?PeachNCream - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
It's another X299 MSI motherboard review, because we really need to hear more about MSI products since there are no other vendors out there that produce computer parts.