MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ATX Motherboard Review

[Guest]

MSI's latest X99 motherboard invokes divinity. Does it deserve our worship, or is it a false idol?

MSI X99A Godlike Gaming ATX Motherboard Review : Read more

 

[Achaios]

"Godlike Gaming" You don't even need to read anything further to come to the conclusion that they are BS'ing you.

 

[Guest]

There is one major problem with this motherboard which renders entire package f. useless and that is Killer E2400 which simply sucks.

 

[elbert]

The latest bios version supports Broadwell-EP and seeing some on newegg. I wonder if MSI godlike would allow blk OC? I know Asrock did this for Skylake kin Xeons few months back so any chance of some tweaking? I see the Intel Xeon E5-2620 V4 8 core for $433 which could make this high priced board much more appealing.

 

[3ogdy]

Godlike.... What's next? Bible-Z-Power? CondomStrength-X? P-Dow-Pope?
MSI G-Zus' E-ster (-E-leezation)? The Sacredblood competing with Sabertooh?
Put a Devil's Canyon on a Pope's PowerLight 2016? Let's hope they won't have children.
MSI 6-5P0T? The FL35HL16HT 4 (in collaboration with) YO'MOMMA stick?

Introducing the new gaming seat from MSI: The Rectum Z! The ultimate X-perience!

FFS...

Seriously now,
What if I happen to have boot problems or lag while gaming on that motherboard? Does that mean GOD doesn't LIKE me?
What does it mean if there's a better board around? That God is gaming on bullshit hardware? I bet God can game better, right?

And isn't it strange that it's nothing but a GodLike motherboard that's using the 2 most typical colors from hell - red and black? Wasn't heaven supposed to be white and all that?

 

[RedJaron]

"Godlike Gaming" You don't even need to read anything further to come to the conclusion that they are BS'ing you.

It's bold, probably overzealous marketing. But no worse than Republic of Gamers, K|NGP|N, or many other brandings. But names and branding don't return performance results like this. If MSI is BS'ing me with this, I could use some more BS.

There is one major problem with this motherboard which renders entire package f. useless and that is Killer E2400 which simply sucks.

I've seen problems with the 2200, especially on Linux, but not so much for the 2400. I didn't have a single problem with it in my testing.

The latest bios version supports Broadwell-EP and seeing some on newegg. I wonder if MSI godlike would allow blk OC? I know Asrock did this for Skylake kin Xeons few months back so any chance of some tweaking? I see the Intel Xeon E5-2620 V4 8 core for $433 which could make this high priced board much more appealing.

You're talking completely different platforms. Broadwell is simply a die shrink of Haswell. Skylake is only on the LGA1151 socket right now. We haven't seen the Skylake successor to LGA2011-3 yet.

If you dropped an E5v4 Xeon in here, yes, you could OC it using BCLK just like you could with all other Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, or Haswell Xeons. However, Broadwell doesn't change the BCLK like Skylake does, so you'd likely only be able to get a 5% OC.

 

[Onus]

At $540 on Newegg, this board costs almost as much as a whole PC that would be a modest but competent gamer. I don't see one on my short list.

 

[RedJaron]

At $540 on Newegg, this board costs almost as much as a whole PC that would be a modest but competent gamer. I don't see one on my short list.

I made the exact same observation. Now I find myself making excuses at how my next computer needs to be X99. It's kind of like an SSD. Once you try one, it's hard to go back.

. . . I think I need help, maybe an intervention. 😉

 

[elbert]

You're talking completely different platforms. Broadwell is simply a die shrink of Haswell. Skylake is only on the LGA1151 socket right now. We haven't seen the Skylake successor to LGA2011-3 yet.

If you dropped an E5v4 Xeon in here, yes, you could OC it using BCLK just like you could with all other Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, or Haswell Xeons. However, Broadwell doesn't change the BCLK like Skylake does, so you'd likely only be able to get a 5% OC.

True but they both use microcode to control their defaults. I understand Intel fix their microcode to close the exploit in future Xeon V5. Due to defaults and thus micro code in the broadwell-LP has changed could their be exploits for board makers?

I also hear a broadwell-ep 5.1Ghz E5-2602 V4 may be coming.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

"Godlike Gaming" You don't even need to read anything further to come to the conclusion that they are BS'ing you.

Exactly - you didn't read anything. If you read the review, it's a very high quality board.

 

[joex444]

That PCIe breakdown is awful. The switching of the M.2 slot to PCIe 2.0 x2 from 3.0 x4 would be unacceptable; buying the NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs today is a premium purchase and anyone interested in that simply requires that it runs at 3.0 x4 - not 2.0 x2 (a mere quarter of the bandwidth). The fact with a 40-lane CPU you can only get 3.0 x4 M.2 working with 1 or 2 PCie cards is absurd even for a $200 board. The fact that a RAID controller operating with an x8 configuration counts as well means that you can have an M.2 NVMe 3.0 x4 SSD, an x8 RAID controller, and be unable to run SLI graphics. Unless you buy the cheaper 28 lane CPU - then you can have SLI, RAID, and NVMe 3.0 x4.

The engineers who came up with this one probably were trying to get people who were considering the 5930K + $250 X99 board to consider the 5820K + $500 board - net cost is about the same, but clearly MSI would benefit more from the second purchase than the first.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

joex, voting yourself up is looked down upon.

 

[RedJaron]

Elbert, I have no information on Broadwell-EP nor on the socket successor to LGA2011-3, so speculating on what will or won't be locked down is kinda fruitless right now. Yes, some microcode has been patched on the LGA1151 boards, but that's up to the chipset and the board mfrs about how it's implemented. But none of that has any bearing on X99.

 

[Eggz]

Nice board, but that's a lot of money for a total lack of Thunderbolt 3.

 

[RedJaron]

That PCIe breakdown is awful. The switching of the M.2 slot to PCIe 2.0 x2 from 3.0 x4 would be unacceptable; buying the NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs today is a premium purchase and anyone interested in that simply requires that it runs at 3.0 x4 - not 2.0 x2 (a mere quarter of the bandwidth). The fact with a 40-lane CPU you can only get 3.0 x4 M.2 working with 1 or 2 PCie cards is absurd even for a $200 board. The fact that a RAID controller operating with an x8 configuration counts as well means that you can have an M.2 NVMe 3.0 x4 SSD, an x8 RAID controller, and be unable to run SLI graphics. Unless you buy the cheaper 28 lane CPU - then you can have SLI, RAID, and NVMe 3.0 x4.

The engineers who came up with this one probably were trying to get people who were considering the 5930K + $250 X99 board to consider the 5820K + $500 board - net cost is about the same, but clearly MSI would benefit more from the second purchase than the first.

This is my one big complaint on the board. I don't understand why they decided to have it work this way. My only guess is that MSI put priority on graphics over storage, but even then I think it could have been done better. But yes, the M.2 shares with the bottom PCIe slot. I'm curious how a 40-lane CPU would deal with three cards in the top slots ( which is the configuration for 28-lane CPUs ). Sadly, I don't have three identical GPUs to try it.

Nice board, but that's a lot of money for a total lack of Thunderbolt 3.

I don't think TB3 is nearly as important on a desktop as it is on mobile devices. Consider what you would use it for. External displays? That's up to your dGPU since X99 doesn't support integrated graphics. External PCIe storage? You've got an M.2 and U.2 drive available in here, as well as open PCIe slots for fast storage.

 

[Eggz]

Nice board, but that's a lot of money for a total lack of Thunderbolt 3.

I don't think TB3 is nearly as important on a desktop as it is on mobile devices. Consider what you would use it for. External displays? That's up to your dGPU since X99 doesn't support integrated graphics. External PCIe storage? You've got an M.2 and U.2 drive available in here, as well as open PCIe slots for fast storage.

I would use it as a 40 Gbps network server, which would benefit from X99's cores (6-8). Laptops and other devices could plug right into it and fly if there were a TB3 throughput.

 

[Nuckles_56]

I wish you had a photo of the LED lighting actually used, that would have been nice to see what it was like

 

[sillynilly]

I wish you had a photo of the LED lighting actually used, that would have been nice to see what it was like

It's Godlike.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

The thing is, the board has a red theme, but whatever color you reflect off red, it still will be reddish.

 

[RedJaron]

I would use it as a 40 Gbps network server, which would benefit from X99's cores (6-8). Laptops and other devices could plug right into it and fly if there were a TB3 throughput.

I think it's safe to say MSI wasn't designing this board to be the base of an enterprise-level network server.

I wish you had a photo of the LED lighting actually used, that would have been nice to see what it was like

It's difficult to capture well in photos. MSI's product page actually has a pretty good simulation of it. I might try to capture a video, I'm not sure.

 

[JonDol]

I take this MB as a joke: ALC sound, no Thunderbolt (version 3 please) and yet it is more expensive than the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming G1.

 

[Onus]

If this weren't specifically labeled a "Gaming" board, the concerns about storage would be a lot more valid. We're not all basement-dwelling multi-GPU gamers though, so this is simply not our board. We need to wait for the Godlike Office version.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

I take this MB as a joke: ALC sound, no Thunderbolt (version 3 please) and yet it is more expensive than the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming G1.

Do you use thunderbolt 3 ever?

 

[Eggz]

I would use it as a 40 Gbps network server, which would benefit from X99's cores (6-8). Laptops and other devices could plug right into it and fly if there were a TB3 throughput.

I think it's safe to say MSI wasn't designing this board to be the base of an enterprise-level network server.

True, but they didn't have to. Intel already built that into the Thunderbolt 3 spec.

All that said, it's a nice board. Lack of Thunderbolt doesn't detract from that. It's just something that should be there at this price point.

I take this MB as a joke: ALC sound, no Thunderbolt (version 3 please) and yet it is more expensive than the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming G1.

Do you use thunderbolt 3 ever?

For $500~ish, I'd expect an entire host features that most people would never use. One of those is a Thunderbolt 3 passthrough (i.e. 2 ports), but there are none. When you pay all the money, you should get all the bells and whistles. It's then up to you whether to use them or not. Manufacturers can (and should) make that decision for you, but only on lower model hardware - not this stuff.

If this weren't specifically labeled a "Gaming" board, the concerns about storage would be a lot more valid. We're not all basement-dwelling multi-GPU gamers though, so this is simply not our board. We need to wait for the Godlike Office version.

Does it really matter what the sticker on the box says? They could have branded this thing as "Made for Unicorns," and if the price were still in excess of $500, it should have all the bells and whistles.

 

[Onus]

For that price, it does indeed need everything, possibly including the kitchen sink (so it can clean up after it makes you a sandwich).