The MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK Motherboard Review: Light up the Night

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.