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.
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Diji1 - Wednesday, March 7, 2018 - link
>don't buy that QoS bullshit, Ian, you're not stupid, if some idiot is shittorenting on ADSL no amount of qosSo you've never used (or properly configured?) a device with QoS then I take it because if you had you wouldn't be dribbling inane stuff from your imagination like this.
karakarga - Wednesday, March 7, 2018 - link
New mainboards may start to use Doby Atmos playback with 9.1.6 output. New UHD films may soon adapt to it. Buying an amplifier is really expensive for hearing it. Computer with the help of CPU may ease it for us.PeachNCream - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
Lots of us have a very good understanding of networking so don't discount us as lacking the knowledge necessary to make sense of what Rivet Networks says their hardware is doing with respect to packet analysis and traffic prioritization. Maybe the specific implementation is unique to Killer NICs (I'd even argue that's not the case since they're moving to Intel hardware so if there is packet prioritization happening in hardware, it'll eventually be Intel's implementation with Rivet's interface atop it to allow user configuration). It also seems preconceived (alarmingly so) to assume the readers would just pop in to make negative comments if you go through the trouble of running benchmarks. I'd like to think there's value in what Anandtech publishes which is why most of us, even those with strongly negative opinions about Killer products, are here in the first place reading articles. Some of us don't clearly articulate why we don't like something though. Instead it might come off as general loathing, but I think the feedback you're getting here is rooted in the favorable light Killer is cast in without supporting data that's further combined with negative customer experiences of past Killer NIC products. If you'd like to address that perception and remain as outwardly positive quantified data that isn't marketing material direct from the company would go a long way because claims would have the necessary backing.I do worry though, that the Killer NIC's benefits can't be realized in benchmarks. If its the case that the key selling points aren't measurable, repeatable, or demonstrable then do they really exist? Are the use cases where a Killer NIC's benefits most likely to be realized commonplace enough to begin with and if they are, what sorts of difficulties make measurement so elusive? It's hard to accept the sales pitch if there's not a trustworthy third party out there that can show they actually exist.
I understand why you'd like to consult with Rivet's personnel in the process of finding a way to measure and demonstrate what their hardware can do, but surely they already went through this trouble to get the numbers for their marketing materials that would put their product performance into bar graphs alongside other common network adapters. They've got to have invented that wheel already if they're claiming those benefits since false claims would expose the company to legal liability. It'd be odd that they're mum about it since their hardware appeals to a crowd of technically-inclined consumers that get very excited over a 2ms improvement in ping times to a game server.
nevcairiel - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
>If you are gaming, plus downloading, plus streaming, plus watching youtube on another monitor etc,> the priority thing does its job.
I have my router doing proper QoS, I can download at full speed and not notice a dip in gaming. IMHO the "bottleneck" in the network needs to perform this task for good results, and thats often the gateway from ethernet to the internet.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
Downloading barely affects gaming sessions (game data downloaded from an online match is small), uploading beyond a certain threshold will kill it (climbing ms+).andychow - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
I like the presence of U.2, but killer networking + RGB LEDS = no way I'm buying that. The RGB LEDs you can probably turn off, which just wastes a little money. But killer networking is really the deal breaker. It's something most people would pay extra to not have. Why do board makers ever accept using this brand?Even when killer hardware is based on Intel (these aren't), their custom firmware and drivers is just junk.
Look online, most people that have the Killer 1535 just end up getting another wifi card.
Gothmoth - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
no word about the bios issues... anandtech articles are now basically just a feature list with more words.Joe Shields - Wednesday, March 7, 2018 - link
What BIOS issues? I did not run into any throughout testing. Perhaps the BIOS used fixed something from previous versions? Do you have a link to said problems?timecop1818 - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
> What happens when a vendor adds 802.11ac to Killer networking?You lose sales.
Fuck killer and fuck any vendor that uses their shit.
jjj - Monday, March 5, 2018 - link
1 year later, AT still avoids Ryzen mobos with extreme ferocity.And it gets so much worse worse, you focus on X299, a platform almost nobody buys.
Go count the mobo reviews in the last year. By my count , you got;
12 reviews for X299
6 reviews for for Z270
2 reviews for for Z370
2 reviews for X370
1 review for TR
Objectivity and serving the reader might not be this site's goal but even if your goal is to sell hardware, how is focusing on products that do not sell, serving your financial interests.
The way this makes sense, is if someone is paying you to promote x299 at any cost. Otherwise, what you are doing is insanity.