MSI X99A Gaming 7 Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Benchmarks - Overclocked
As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match. The effective overclock for these tests is 4.3Ghz @ 34x multiplier and 125Mhz BCLK. Overclocking the X99A Gaming 7 was extremely easy, no BIOS issues, memory was solid and no trouble setting voltages in fact, I would be hard pressed to not call this an OC board in Gamer clothing.
Overclocking the Haswell-E is a lot like overclocking a standard Haswell. All of the same controls are available and they all react the same. There are a few notable differences and all seem to be related to heat, Given that the TDP is 140w you’re going to need a cooler that will dissipate 250+ Watts if you want to maintain decent temps.
I found that the Core i7 5960X loves overclocking with BCLK and while I know my processor will fun faster than 125Mhz I stopped there so I could evenly match the multiplier for a smooth 4.3Ghz. The side benefit to running the system this was is a mild overclock to the memory from XMP 2666Mhz up to XMP 2750Mhz. That change alone makes up the performance loss of less CPU cycles and does so with less heat.
Speaking of overclocking one of the hot things is overclocking the Uncore (Memory controller) for even better performance. The problem is most motherboards don't support this and may require hardware modifications or will simply not allow it.
Much to my suprise the MSI X99A Gaming 7 is fully supportive of Uncore clocking and I was able to run 3.5Ghz Uncore with no voltage adjustments and did so using a set of HyperX Predator 3000Mhz DDR4 memory modules running the XMP Profile. The best part is, the tweak was super stable and only took about 10min to figure out.
