MSI X299 SLI Plus Intel X-Series Motherboard Review

Introduction MSI X299 SLI Plus If you're a fan of MSI motherboards, then you're likely familiar with their SLI Plus series. These motherboards come packed full of many of the high-end features you would want from an enthusiast system. Of course, as the name suggests, they come with a focus on dual-GPU configurations, offering plenty of room for a pair of the thickest gaming or workstation cards on the market. Of course, GPU's aren't the only high-end hardware supported. This motherboard offers up support for the latest X-Series processors from Intel, including their flagship i9 hardware. Quad-channel memory, multiple M.2 drivers, robust storage connections and so much more should ensure your next gaming or workstation system offers up incredible performance. Features Supports Intel® Core™ X-Series Processor Family for LGA2066 Socket Support Quad Channel DDR4-4133(OC)+, Dual Channel DDR4-4500(OC)+ Dual Intel® LAN: The best solution for both Intranet and Internet through hardware design and bandwidth management offering the lowest latency. M.2 SHIELD: Keep M.2 SSDs safe while preventing throttling, making them run cooler & faster. DDR4 BOOST: Give your DDR4 memory a performance boost. Designed for Extreme Performance: TURBO SOCKET with OC Genie 4, DIGITALL POWER Design Lightning Fast Experience: TWIN TURBO M.2 and Intel® Optane Memory Ready, Turbo U.2, LIGHTNING USB 3.1 GEN2 MYSTIC LIGHT: 7 mixed color schemes / 8 LED effects controlled in one click SYSTEM SAVER: 3 easy-to-use options to successfully boot your system again. AUDIO BOOST 4: Reward your ears with studio grade sound quality for the most immersive audio experience MULTI-GPU: With STEEL ARMOR PCI-E slots. Supports 3-way NVIDIA SLI™ / AMD Crossfire™ VR READY: Best virtual reality experience without latency, reduces motion sickness EZ Debug LED: Easiest way to troubleshoot Making Your Life Easier is our Business "Combining quality you can rely on with top performance and clever business solutions are key aspects of the MSI PRO SERIES motherboards. Engineered to gratify even the most demanding professional, these motherboards will fit in any PC. Making your life easier and supporting your business with super stable, reliable and long-lasting top performance." - MSI Motherboard Overview Equipped with high-end features and flawless design, the SLI Plus is certainly an attractive solution. You'll find reinforced hardware with chunky heat sinks, PCIe Armour, M.2 Shield and more. Of course, that's all backed up with Audio Boost 4, delivering 120 dB SNR 32-bit audio, Dual Intel LAN, BIOS Flashback+ and other value adding features. Included Extras Included in the box, you'll find a few extra cables, the software disc, motherboard backplate, and SLI bridge, and all the usual documentation. Nothing too complex, but it's everything you need to get going. A Closer Look This is a stunning looking motherboard, and while it lacks a lot of colour, the monochrome theme should blend in well with your system. Of course, it's packing some lovely RGB lighting on the various shrouds and heat sinks, so once powered up, you'll be able to give it all of the colour you desire. Sitting proudly in the middle is that huge X299 socket. I've got good hopes for the overclocking performance too, as there's a robust VRM/Choke setup behind the CPU and a chunky metal heat sink to keep the hardware cool. The CPU draws power from a single 8-pin header, so I wouldn't expect overclocks to be as crazy as the higher end boards with dual CPU power connections, but there should be more than enough power here. Built-in Rear I/O Guard There's no Armour on the DDR4 slots, although there doesn't need to be, it does look nice when it's there. The rear I/O is gorgeous though, with a chunky built-in shroud that keeps it looking neat and tidy. Of course, it's got some lovely RGB lighting built-in too. Down the right side, a handy debug-LED that'll prove useful when tweaking settings. The motherboard 24-pin is fairly straight forward, and there's a USB 3.0 and 3.1 header below that. Further down the board, there's a second USB 3.0 header, 6+2 SATA 6Gbps connections, and dual U.2. Clearly, connectivity isn't going to be a problem here. Moving across the motherboard, you'll find two M.2 drive bays, one with an M.2 Shield, the other exposed. A cover on both would have been very nice though. The bottom row is packed with headers for RGB lighting, fans, USB 2.0 headers, HD audio and more. Right in the middle, you'll find two small controls for power and reset, which are great when tinkering on a test bench. Armoured PCI and M.2 There are four full-size PCIe slots, two with Armour to support the weight of high-end expansion cards. There's also a pair of 1x PCIe which are great for smaller add-in cards. This motherboard packs some serious audio hardware, which is isolated from the main board with a trace. The bulk of it hides under the shroud, where you'll find the DAC, but there are some exposed gold capacitors in the bottom left too. The rear I/O guard isn't pre-installed, but is included in the box. There are BIOS/CMOS controls onboard, which is very handy while overclocking. Below that, PS2, 4 x USB 2.0, 5 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB Type-C. Networking shouldn't be an issue here, with dual 1Gbe connectors. Finally, HD audio jacks with gold plated ports and an optical connector. There's not much else to see on the other side of the board. However, it's nice to see that the VMR heat sink is mounted securely on the board. The heat sink has a backplate and is screwed on for added durability. Testing & Methodology Test Systems used for review and comparisons and in previous benchmarks: X299 CPU – Intel Core i9-7900X Motherboard – Changes per review RAM – Crucial Ballistix 16GB (2x8GB) 2400MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AM4 CPU – Ryzen R7 1800X Motherboard – Changes per review RAM – Crucial Ballistix 16GB (2x8GB) 2400MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z270 Motherboard – Combination used to determine widespread performance RAM – Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz (16-17-17) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X99 Motherboard – ASUS ROG STRIX X99 GAMING RAM – 32GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (4x8GB) 2400MHz (16-16-16-39) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z170 Motherboard – ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ RAM – Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz (16-17-17) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z87 Motherboard – ASUS Maximus VII Ranger RAM – 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport XT (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1866MHz (10-10-10-30) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Games Used Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Test Software Cinebench – available here WPrime – available here SiSoft Sandra Engineer – available here 3DMark – available here AIDA64 Engineer – available here Passmark – available here CPUID HWMonitor – available here CPU-Z – available here Storage Testing Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB SATA Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB NVMe M.2 Patriot SuperSonic Magnum 256GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Test Procedure Memory For our memory tests, we use the built-in memory benchmarks in AIDA64 Engineer and SiSoft Sandra. For more details on each of the benchmarks please see here and here respectively. Storage To test the storage performance in our motherboard reviews we use AIDA’s Disk Benchmark utility built into their AIDA64 Engineer Edition software package and run linear read and write tests. We run each of the benchmark tests on a SATA III, USB 3.0 and M.2 device. For SATA III testing we use a SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB, for USB 3.0 testing we use the Supersonic Magnum 256 GB USB 3.0 flash drive and for M.2 testing we use Plextor’s 256GB M.2 M6e SSD; the drives are always formatted before use. Networking For our networking tests we connect the test system up to our Intel Gigabit-enabled X99 motherboard test system through the ASUS RT-AC68U router. We opted for this over a direct point-to-point connection because we wanted to simulate real-world performance. For our WiFi tests, we do the same except we connect the test system to the ASUS RT-AC68U router via WiFi at a distance of 5 metres from the router. The testing is conducted using PassMark’s Advanced Network Test detailed below. PassMark The PassMark Advanced Network Test (which is part of PerformanceTest) is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers must act as the server and will sit waiting for a connection. The other computer acts as a client. It connects to the server machine and sends data to it for the duration of the test. You can download a trial version of PerformanceTest from here. Power Usage To measure power consumption we, use a “killawatt” meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different use-case scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading. RightMark Audio Analyser (RMAA) RMAA suite is designed for testing quality of analogue and digital paths of any audio device. The results are obtained by playing and recording test signals passed through the tested audio path by means of frequency analysis algorithms. A more common mark is also provided for those unfamiliar with measured technical parameters. Available here. We run the RMAA test using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable connecting the line-out to the line-in to test the quality of the motherboard audio codec, not any external audio devices. Complete playback and recording test at default settings and then get RMAA to interpret the results giving the below outputs. Finally, we sync the playback and recording audio devices to the same setting as the test for accurate results. wPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. Cinebench R15 Cinebench is a widely respected benchmark for testing the performance of x86 CPUs. The program allows you to test single and multi-threaded performance as well as GPU performance by rendering with Open GL. Download here. 3D Mark The new 3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware. With three all new tests you can bench everything from smartphones and tablets to notebooks and home PCs, to the latest high-end, multi-GPU gaming desktops. Download here. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided We run the games internal benchmark with the ultra preset applied, AA turned off, V-sync off, and at a resolution of 1920 x 1080. Rise of the Tomb Raider We run the games internal benchmark with the very high preset applied, FXAA turned on, V-sync off, TrueHair off, and at a resolution of 1920 x 1080. Thank you Noctua, Crucial, ASUS, Gigabyte, Lian-Li, be quiet!, OCZ, for providing the hardware that helps makes these tests possible! CPU & GPU Performance Cinebench Staright away the SLI Plus is off to a strong start, scoring as one of the fastest X299 boards to date in Cinebench. Overclocking didn't bring a huge benefit, but it's still a strong performance overall and far from disapointing. WPrime As you would expect the SLI Plus keeps up the pace in Wprime, not as fast as the gaming boards, but close enough to still count. Overclocking did bring the time down a little, moving it from 4th to 3rd fastest. SiSoft Sandra Again, another very strong performance here, with just the two gaming boards from Aorus holding the lead. This shouldn't come as a shock anyway, as the SLI Plus is a little more affordable than either of the Aorus boards. 3DMark Another great result here, with a very competitive score of 16646. Overclocking took that score up to a very tasty 17020, which is what we would expect to see from a board of this class. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Gaming clearly isn't an issue here either, with another competitive score. Of course, this isn't about frame rates as much as it is PCIe throughput, and there are no issues to be found. There was a small gain from overclocking, giving us a perfect score for this benchmark. Rise of the Tomb Raider The SLI Plus delivered fantastic frame rates of over 120FPS, putting it along side all other X299 motherboards we've tested. Overclocking brought that performance to over 130FPS, giving us our second best score to date. Memory Performance AIDA64 Engineer Memory performance is right where we expected it to be, scoring similar results to all other X299 motherboards tested so far. Obviously, there are no issue here either, so far so good! Combined Latency Test Memory latency is quite high on the many-core CPUs this year, but the SLI Plus still fared better than most in both tests. Storage Performance Linear Read Nothing major to report here either, but it's always good to see a motherboard performing exactly how it should be with various storage devices. The write tests are undramatic, but reassuring too. Linear Write Networking Performance Passmark Performance Test 8 - Ethernet Another perfect score here, with Ethernet throughput being as good as we can hope for from our testing environment. It's pretty much identical to all other X299 boards we've tested. Passmark Performance Test 8 - CPU Work Load Final Thoughts Price The latest X299 motherboard from MSI is certainly one of the best value boards on the market right now. At just £239.99 it's not exactly cheap, but it competes very well with boards that are much more expensive. This is obviously an attractive aspect of this board and it's not exactly lacking in features at this price range. Overview Without a doubt, this is a fantastic looking motherboard. It's a little more mature in terms of design than some of the purely gaming focused motherboards too. The darker black design looks great, and the built-in shrouds over the audio and rear I/O hardware make it look as sleek and clean as you could hope for. While it does still go down the RGB lighting route, I think it's done quite tastefully. It highlights the VRM cooler and chipset cooler, without causing a dizzying rainbow of lighting. Durable by Design MSI has a strong reputation of heavy duty hardware, and the same holds true on their latest X299 motherboard. It feels robust and doesn't bend or flex when handled. All the important hardware, such as the SLI slots, are reinforced to support the added weight of modern components. The VRM cooler has a thick backplate too and uses a screw on design to ensure a firm contact with the hardware. Great Performance The performance on this motherboard is certainly competitive with any other X299 board we've tested to date. It's not the fastest or slowest overall, but it's still one of the best priced too in terms of features on offer. If you're building a workstation or gaming rig that's going to focus on single or dual GPU configuration, it's sure to tick all the right boxes. It's going to deliver great performance in any gaming or rendering tasks. Of course, most of that performance relies on your GPU/CPU combo, but the throughput on the motherboard is far from being a hindrance to either. Great Value The SLI Plus is equipped with dual Intel LAN, M.2 Shield, Turbo M.2, Optane, Turbo U.2, Lightning USB 3.1 Gen 2, Mystic Light, Audio Boost 4, and much more. Overall, there's enough added value here to make this an attractive option for any system builder. The various features help squeeze the best performance out of your hardware with minimal effort, often just a few clicks in the BIOS, making it beginner friendly. However, it still offers all the advanced features that would keep the enthusiast crowd happy too. Pros Skylake-X Support Easy overclocking Professional looking aesthetics Durable build quality Competitive performance Dual LAN Armoured PCIe slots Competitively priced Cons None Neutral Only one of the M.2 slots has an Armour cover "If you're building a powerful gaming or workstation system, with a dual GPU configuration, the SLI Plus from MSI is one of the most competitive options on the market today."