MSI X99A Godlike Gaming Motherboard Review

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  While the gameplay and weapons are similar to the UT2004 counterpart, the gaming engine is all new.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  The resolution was set to 800x600 to minimize any performance gains from the video card.

Crysis is based in a fictional future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island near the coast of China.  Crysis uses Microsoft's new DirectX 10 for graphics rendering, and includes the same editor that was used by Crytek to create the game.  Consider it the pretty version of Far Cry.

Call of Duty 4 is a very fast paced first person shooter based on modern warfare tactics and weapons.  The game is based on DirectX 9 technology and really shows that game developers can make incredible looking games using older technology.  For this benchmark we are using a custom timedemo that was recorded during an actual online multiplayer game.  The demo is then replayed as a benchmark in the game with the average FPS recorded at the end.

XviD Movie Encoding Test: This is a new test that was added to cover other sections of real-world performance. The test consists of a simple task of encoding a DVD rip from VOB to AVI with AutoGK 2.45 using the XviD codec. The movie used is the first chapter of Dirty Pair Flash #2 and consisted of 40104 frames. The time shown is how many frames per second were processed during the first pass to encode the video files.

Bapco SYSmark 2012 is a true real-world benchmarking suite and upgrade to SYSmark 2007 Preview.  The new benchmark brings true 64-bit application testing along with full support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.  SYSmark tests the whole system performance by running through a series of real programs while recording the results.  These programs include: ABBYY FineReader pro 10.0, Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, Adobe After Effects CS5, Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, Adobe Flash player 10.1, AutoDesk 3DS Max 2011, AutoDesk AutoCAD 2011, Google Sketchup Pro 8, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft Office 2010, Mozilla Firefox Installer, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.8, Winzip Pro 14.5.

PCMark Vantage is a system benchmark from the makers of 3DMark.  It uses a variety of 2d tests to determine an overall computer score based on your system configuration.  The PCMark score is completely portable however to recreate it the score completely you will need almost identical hardware.

PCMark 7 is a overall system benchmark designed for Windows 7 that combines more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. The PCMark score is completely portable however to recreate it the score completely you will need almost identical hardware.

PCMark 8 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. There are six individual testing scenarios using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

Our real world benchmarks are designed to illustrate a cross section in performance that covers gaming, video encoding, content creation and everyday office applications.  Our results are pretty straight forward and show some good numbers across the board.  Normally performance differences can be attributed to UEFI tuning and memory compatibility.
 
It should be noted that directX 11 is not represented in our motherboard reviews because the results are almost purely based on the video card and has very little to do with motherboard performance.  Likewise the benchmarks we have chosen respond well to minor changes in memory bandwidth and how efficient the system configuration is.  

When we test our systems we do so with the default and auto assigned settings in place so to represent un-turned and out of box performance.  (read: default user setups).  Your performance may vary depending on the time you spent tuning your hardware.  As the charts show the MSI X99A Godlike pulling ahead in the system benchmarks and fell behind when it came to our gaming benchmarks.  Granted these games are "quote old" but work well to expose subsystem differences and in this case the biggest change was the addition of a nVidia GTX 980Ti.

Thing is, Sandra showed no change in synthetic multimedia performance and the biggest gains were with PCMark 7 and only a slight gain in Sysmark 2012 which leads me to believe that some nVidia driver magic is at work messing up the FPS again.