The MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK Motherboard Review: Light up the Night
by Joe Shields on March 5, 2018 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- ATX
- M.2
- USB 3.1
- RGB
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Skylake-X
- Kaby Lake-X
- i9-7900X
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC for the supported frequency of the processor for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
* Results with a * were performed with our second Core i9-7900X processor.
Rendering - Blender 2.78: link
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
In the Blender testing, the MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK completed the benchmark in 205 seconds, around the same metric as most of our other results.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.
For our POV-Ray results, the Gaming M7 ACK lands in the middle segment of the results. POV-Ray is sensitive to frequency with boards making the most of an MCE implementation leading the pack.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.
WinRAR data places the X299 Gaming M7 ACK second at 34.8 seconds which is an average number in the middle of the pack.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Our 7-Zip results are similar here with the Gaming M7 ACK landing dead middle of a very tightly packed group. This board, as the majority of others, boosted to 4 GHz during this testing.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz, and IPC win in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Similarly, the 3DPM result lands the X299 Gaming M7 ACK in the middle of the pack. During this test it performs six mini-tests with a 10-second gap between them: our result is from a 3.6 GHz CPU clock speed during the test as are most from this set of results.
Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link
The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. Results are taken during the steady state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).
In the DigiCortex testing, this MSI board managed to be tied for last place with the Mini-ITX sized ASRock board at 1.13 fraction of real-time simulation possible. These results are also very tightly packed together essentially giving the MSI motherboard the same score as most of the others we have tested.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
View All Comments
mkaibear - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
>dual Realtek audio chipsHrm
>Killer based networking,
Pass
> and plenty of RGB LEDs to light up the case
Hard pass
CheapSushi - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
Hating on Killer NICs has become a dumb meme. And guess what? The newer chips are often actual Intel. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12178/its-actually-...mkaibear - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
I choose to "hate on them" because their USP is that they make the board somehow faster in online gaming, yet every independent test shows them to not do that - plus they increase the BOM significantly for no real benefit.The Killer chips on this board aren't Intel btw.
(There's a bit of personal history involved too - I've had several machines with Killer networking chips and they've all had significant driver problems)
nevcairiel - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
Reputation is hard to fix, and if its just an Intel chip, whats the premium you get from those exactly?Personally I'll always prefer a board with plain Intel NICs, and WiFi on a PC board is meaningless to me anyway (the one you linked is Killer WiFi, not Ethernet)
Flunk - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
Still a waste of money on that BoM and you get the annoying Killer app.Something being mentioned in a meme (and all memes are dumb), doesn't make it untrue.
Pork@III - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
RGB LED give you +20 armor :D69369369 - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
RGB LED give me erection :DPeachNCream - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
Yet another x299 motherboard review of yet another yawn-fest RGB and Killer NIC been there and done that also ran gaming product. What's missing here is a non-standard approach and reviews up and down the product stacks of various vendors. This is what happens when you rely exclusively on what companies are willing to send you for free in the mail. They spoon feed journalists a series of gaming-class products with stupid features so we readers rarely see any decent analysis on the wider cost ranges of boards out there because poor people like Joe end up wasting their time messing with boards that only a small number of people purchase. The same thing happens with phones, processors, GPUs, and so forth.I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but it's frustrating and makes this Peach not overly fond of tech journalism at large. Add that to the years of touting Rivet Networks Killer products without ever justifying it with a benchmark or two that demonstrates there's a reason for the boosting writers have to do and it the whole site feels disappointing even if there's value in other articles. I mean there's not even a networking benchmark at all so we can't even infer added value by comparing a Killer whatever to vanilla Intel using results elsewhere. If the opening shots of the article are going to cite networking connectivity, why isn't that given even a cursory examination in the subsequent pages? What's going on Anandtech?
Ian Cutress - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
Networking is extremely hard to get right as a test. It's easy to run it at peak speeds, but networks are rarely used in that instance.As for the marked benefit of Killer, it comes down to something not overly benchmarkable: online performance with concurrent data streams. If you are gaming, plus downloading, plus streaming, plus watching youtube on another monitor etc, the priority thing does its job. Most solutions are purely software-based - Killer's stuff is actually in hardware: for what isn't whitelisted, the packet analytics can work to decipher what sort of data is coming through, and from where: video, audio, direct downloads, torrents, and such all have detectable ways that the packet data is processed. Different codecs can have different packet profiles, and the Killer stuff is designed to detect them and adjust the return priority as appropriate. A packet will get tagged with a priority and sit in the incoming/outgoing queues, sometimes bypassing the queue altogether. Without deep networking knowledge, and hooks into the Killer hardware requirements, this is super difficult to benchmark. Unless you want a non-repeatable test with an uninterpretable result, or a repeatable test with no real-world value.
I'd love to get some proper Killer testing in, combined with an interview with the CEO and CTO. I can just tell from the comments that it would be a piece that people come just to comment negatively, rather than read, because of the Killer experience in the past. It's a topic I've discussed with the Killer team on numerous occasions.
As for the glut of X299 reviews, we have different reviewers for each chipset/socket: Joe on X299/Z370, Gavin on AM4, Tracy on TR4. Tracy has been waylayed due to lack of hardware, Gavin is new so getting up to speed, and Joe is powering through. Joe is only just moving to Z370 as well, and has a few of those already half-done.
timecop1818 - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
> I'd love to get some proper Killer testing in, combined with an interview with the CEO and CTO.Why not actually do that? I would come to read it and laugh at the graphs showing killer not excelling at anything in particular.
I guess the reason there's not a killer nic review out there is because it would show how embarrassingly stupid the whole thing is, providing zero advantage at additional cost and actually making things worse by shitty drivers. I don't buy that QoS bullshit, Ian, you're not stupid, if some idiot is shittorenting on ADSL no amount of qos/killer is gonna make a difference when upstream is saturated. Most "gamers" that this is targeted at will either have appropriate broadband connection or be smart enough not to use bandwidth during their gaming sessions. Also with things like NAS etc having torrent/etc clients I just don't see many people using their primary gaming rig for downloading crap (or using shittorrent at all, i know i haven't for years).
I was looking at buying new XPS13 from Dell, saw it had soldered (not socket) killer WiFi, passed it for another brand.