MSI X99A Tomahawk 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.

SYSmark 2014 ver 1.5 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.

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.  The results are pretty straight forward and show some good numbers across the board and reflect some of what was shown on the Synthetic page.  Normally performance differences can be attributed to UEFI tuning and memory compatibility.  Even the slightest change can have a big impact on real world applications and in this case the MSI X99 Tomahawk is walking away with it all.
 
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.