MSI 970 GAMING AMD AM3+ Motherboard Review

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Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Since fewer and fewer consumers seem to be buying discrete sound cards, the quality of a motherboard's onboard audio is now more important than ever. We figured that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at just how good the analog signal quality is on this MSI 970-GAMING.

Since isolated results don't really mean much, but we have also included some numbers from the GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion, ASUS X99-A, ASUS X99-PRO, ASUS Rampage V Extreme, GIGABYTE X99-Gaming G1 WIFI, MSI X99S Gaming 7, EVGA X99 Classified, and ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboards that we have recently reviewed. This 970-GAMING motherboard, the MSI X99S, The GIGABITE Champion, as well as all the ASUS models feature onboard audio solutions that are built around the familiar Realtek ALC1150 CODEC, but feature different op-amps, headphone amplifiers, filtering capacitors, secondary components and layouts. The GIGABYTE X99-Gaming G1 WIFI and EVGA are both based on the same Creative Core3D CA0132 quad-core audio processor, but feature vastly different hardware implementations.

We are going to do this using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, since sound quality isn't really something that can be adequately explained with only numbers. To do this we have turned to the RightMark Audio Analyzer, basically the standard application for this type of testing.

Since all the three motherboards support very high quality 24-bit, 192kHz audio playback we selected that as the sample mode option. Basically, what this test does is pipe the audio signal from the front-channel output to the line-in input via a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male mini-plug cable, and then RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA) does the audio analysis. Obviously we disabled all software enhancements since they interfere with the pure technical performance that we are trying to benchmark.

Click on image to enlarge and reveal additional motherboards​

Despite this motherboard's low price, MSI have clearly outfitted it with a robust onboard audio solution. In fact, this Audio Boost implementation actually wiped the floor with the one that we tested on the MSI X99S-GAMING 7, which is about 3 times the price. Overall, with an 'Excellent' rating in five of eight categories, we are properly impressed with this motherboard's audio capabilities.
Even during our listening session we were very pleased with the audio output. There were no issues or shortcomings that negatively affected the listening experience. As we tend to repeat, we aren't experts in this area, but we suspect that your average user will likewise be perfectly satisfied with this motherboard's onboard audio capabilities.

 

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Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

It wouldn't be an HWC review if we didn't include some overclocking results, so we thoroughly tested out this motherboard's automatic and manual overclocking capabilities. Though it features a new-ish chipset, the 970-GAMING is still fundamentally a regular AM3+ motherboard, so we don't expect any limitations on that front.

Since this is a more affordable model, it will be interesting to see whether the VRM can withstand the huge power demands of an overclocked FX-8000 series chip. As a bonus, we will also see whether this motherboard can handle the flagship 4.7Ghz/5.0Ghz FX-9590 and its 220W TDP.

Our personal pointers when it comes to overclocking these 32nm Vishera processors are to keep the vCore at around 1.45V (for temperature reasons), the CPU-NB voltage at up to 1.35V, the NB voltage at up to 1.20V, and we generally keep the DRAM voltage at between 1.65V to 1.70V. Unlike on past Phenom chips, increasing the CPU-NB frequency on Bulldozer-derived processors doesn't really provide a significant performance gain, nor does increasing the HT Link, so I wouldn't attempt to go much about 2700Mhz on either of them. What does seem important however is having those two frequencies as equal as possible.

You should also overclock by increasing the front-side bus instead of just increasing the multiplier, since it seems to have clear effect on overall performance. When it comes to memory overclocking, this motherboard is rated at up to DDR3-2133, and we did successfully reach this memory speed, but there really aren't any huge gains to be achieved above DDR3-1600.

Auto Overclocking​

MSI’s automatic overclocking feature revolves around the easy one-click OC Genie feature, which is a BIOS-based implementation that only takes about a few seconds to overclock the system, but is quite conservative since it is based on a preset. Effectively, as soon as you click on the OC Genie button in the top left corner of the BIOS, and then save and exit, the system reboots and your automatic overclock is set.

Our thoughts on OC Genie have been relatively consistent over the last few generations – offering only one automatic overclocking option with no settings might make it easy to use, but it is limiting for those users who want a bit more flexibility without actually delving into manual overclocking.

Click on image to enlarge​

As you can see, the OC Genie feature didn't actually overclock this processor, it just permanently set the 4.0Ghz Turbo Core frequency across all the cores. It is slightly underwhelming, but as you will see in the benchmarking section the performance gains are actually noteworthy. The reason for this is that while the stock FX-8320E does indeed ramp up to 4.0Ghz, it is bound by the 95W TDP limit and thus cannot run at that frequency for very long.

Depending on the type and length of workload it will consistently adjust itself to run at anywhere between 3.7Ghz and 4.0Ghz, so you aren't getting the full 4.0Ghz performance potential. With OC Genie, that issue is resolved and the multi-threading performance gains are substantial. As usual, we do wish that there was some type of memory overclock added in as well.

Manual Overclocking

Click on image to enlarge​

When it came to our manual overclock, we were able to push our FX-8302E from 3.20Ghz/4.0Ghz Turbo up to a steady to 4.72Ghz with a 1.45Vcore. Based on our reseach, this is a little bit above average for this particular model, so clearly this motherboard is very competent in the overclocking department. Obviously, with some additional vCore (up to 1.55V is safe if you can contain the heat output) an even higher overclock could have been coaxed from our chip, but we had a secret weapon that we were waiting on to really test this motherboard's mettle.

We were able to increase both the HyperTransport Link and CPU-NB frequency from stock - 2400Mhz and 2200Mhz respectively - to 2662Mhz by increasing the CPU-NB voltage to 1.35V and the NB voltage to 1.20V. As mentioned in the top of this page, increasing either of these clocks past this point doesn't improve performance, but running them synchronously does appear to provide a slight boost.

We were initially aiming for a 250Mhz bus speed, but we hit a wall at around 243Mhz, and had to settle for 242Mhz. In coordination with the unlocked multipliers, this is more than enough bus speed headroom to maximize just about any overclock. We definitely had no complaints about this motherboard's memory overclocking capabilities either. At the default bus speed, the AMD limits to maximum memory speed to DDR3-2133, and we have no problems hitting that target. We did not bother trying to go any higher, since the performance gains are just not there. After perfecting all of the other clock speeds, we settled on DDR3-1935 9-11-10 1T at 1.65V, which is more than sufficient to eliminate any memory bandwidth bottlenecks on this platform.

With our manual overclock out of the way, it was time to roll out the Big Gun. Officially, the 970-GAMING does not support the FX-9590 due to its extraordinarily high 220W TDP - all the others chips on the compatibility list top out at 125W - but we were obviously curious to see whether this affordable motherboard was built with a VRM components that are robust enough for such a hefty power load.

4.7Ghz default / 5.0Ghz Turbo - Click on image to enlarge​

Success! The little motherboard that could handled the beastly flagship FX-9590 with aplomb. Due to its high clock speed and insane 1.54V core voltage, this processor puts an incredible amount of strain on the VRM section of any motherboard, hence why it's only officially supported on the higher-end 990FX motherboards with more robust 8+ phase power designs.

No we did not try to actually overclocking this particular processor simply due to the fact that it was already straining our CPU cooler, and frankly we didn't want to purposely try blowing up a MOSFET for no reason. Since it worked flawlessly at stock settings, we decided to include the FX-9590 in our benchmarking section, where it will go head-to-head against our manual overclock, as well as the FX-8320E in its stock and auto-OC configuration. However, it should be repeated that installing a 220W TDP processor into this board IS NOT recommended.

 

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System Benchmarks

System Benchmarks

In the System and Gaming Benchmarks sections, we reveal the results from a number of benchmarks run with the Core i7-5960X and ASUS X99 Deluxe at default clocks, with the TPU Extreme Tuning preset applied, and using own our manual overclock. This will illustrate how much performance can be achieved with this motherboard in stock and overclocked form. For a thorough comparison of the Core i7-5960X versus a number of different CPUs have a look at our Intel Haswell-E Core i7-5960X Review.

SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. We are running one instance of SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP. This is therefore a single-thread workload.

wPRIME 2.10

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. This is a highly multi-threaded workload.

Cinebench R11.5

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit
Test1: CPU Image Render
Comparison: Generated Score

The latest benchmark from MAXON, Cinebench R11.5 makes use of all your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene using various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. This particular benchmarking can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Sandra Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media Benchmarks

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. The software suite provides most of the information (including undocumented) users like to know about hardware, software, and other devices whether hardware or software. The name “Sandra” is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means "defender", "helper of mankind".

The software version used for these tests is SiSoftware Sandra 2013 SP4. In the 2012 version of Sandra, SiSoft has updated the .Net benchmarks and the GPGPU benchmarks have been upgraded to General Processing (GP) benchmarks, able to fully test the new APU (CPU+GPU) processors. The two benchmarks that we used are the Processor Multi-Media and Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These three benchmarks were chosen as they provide a good indication of three varying types of system performance. The multi-media test shows how the processor handles multi-media instructions and data and the arithmetic test shows how the processor handles arithmetic and floating point instructions. These two tests illustrate two important areas of a computer’s speed and provide a wide scope of results.

MaxxMem Benchmark

Created by MaxxPI², the MaxxMem benchmark tests your computer’s raw memory performance, combining copy, read, write and latency tests into one global score. This memory benchmark is a classic way to measure bandwidth of a memory subsystem.

MaxxMem uses continuous memoryblocks, sized in power of 2 from 16MB up to 512MB, starting either writing to or reading from it. To enable high-precision memory performance measurement, they both internally work with multiple passes and averages calculations per run.

Further, the main goal was to minimize (CPU) cache pollution on memory reads and to eliminate it (almost completely) on memory writes. Additionally, MaxxMem operates with an aggressive data prefetching algorithm. This all will deliver an excellent judge of bandwidth while reading and writing.

 

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Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark v1.1.0
Graphic Settings: Fire Strike Preset
Rendered Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark is the brand new cross-platform benchmark from the gurus over at Futuremark. Designed to test a full range of hardware from smartphones to high-end PCs, it includes three tests for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 hardware, and allows users to compare 3DMark scores with other Windows, Android and iOS devices. Most important to us is the new Fire Strike preset, a DirectX 11 showcase that tests tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Like every new 3DMark version, this test is extremely GPU-bound, but it does contain a heavy physics test that can show off the potential of modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

3DMark 11 v1.0.5
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x720
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark 11 is Futuremark's very latest benchmark, designed to tests all of the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. At the moment, it is lot more GPU-bound than past versions are now, but it does contain a terrific physics test which really taxes modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage v1.1.2
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x1024

Test: Specific CPU Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score

3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses DirectX 10 exclusively so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about this benchmark. Along with being a very capable graphics card testing application, it also has very heavily multi-threaded CPU tests, such Physics Simulation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes it a good all-around gaming benchmark.

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark
Resolution: 1680x1050
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Graphic Settings: High
Comparison: Particle Performance Metric

Originally intended to demonstrate new processing effects added to Half Life 2: Episode 2 and future projects, the particle benchmark condenses what can be found throughout HL2:EP2 and combines it all into one small but deadly package. This test does not symbolize the performance scale for just Episode Two exclusively, but also for many other games and applications that utilize multi-core processing and particle effects. As you will see the benchmark does not score in FPS but rather in its own "Particle Performance Metric", which is useful for direct CPU comparisons.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict 1.2.0.0
Resolution: 1680x1050
Texture & Shader Quality: High
Antialiasing 4X
Anisotropic Mode: 8X
Glow Enabled

Game Benchmark
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC) is the culmination of the X-series of space trading and combat simulator computer games from German developer Egosoft. With its vast space worlds, intricately detailed ships, and excellent multi-threaded game engine, it remains a great test of modern CPU performance.

 

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Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Voltage Regulation

Our voltage regulation testing will focus on the various system voltages and the differences encountered between what is selected in the BIOS and what is measured by a digital multi-meter (DMM). Since this is a budget offering there are obviously no onboard voltage read points, so we did have to go poking & prodding everywhere to find the desired voltages. We didn't find them all, but as you will see below we do have the five main ones. These measurements were taken at stock system speeds, with Turbo Core, C1E, Cool 'N Quiet, and Core C6 State enabled in the BIOS. Here are our findings:

Based on the above results, we have nothing to negative to say about the 970-GAMING's voltage output and regulation. What you select in the BIOS is quite accurately what the motherboard outputs, and even under full load scenarios there's no appreciable vDroop anywhere. This is good since there aren't actually any Load-Line Calibration (LLC) settings anywhere in the BIOS,

Given how important vCore is to system stability, let's take a closer look at its characteristics under full load with a three-hour AIDA64 Stress Test run. During the stress test the processor was running at a default 4.3Ghz with a 1.35Vcore.

This only illustrates a portion of the 180 minute run, but we watched attentively and there were never any dips or spikes. The vCore line was straight as an arrow throughout and it never deviated from 1.352V. You can't really ask for better than that.


Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the BIOS and the Windows power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter. For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter. For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 on all available threads while simultaneously loading the GPU with 3DMark Vantage - Test 6 Perlin Noise.

We don't really have any recent numbers to compare this to, but these power consumption figures are basically what we were expecting. Even with this energy-efficient FX-8320e performance-per-watt is still rather poor on all Bulldozer-based processors, and the situation obviously more worse as you up the clocks and increase the voltage. The FX-9590 proved itself to be an absolute power hog - easily eclipsing even our manual overclock - which goes to show that the 220W TDP is no joke. Thankfully, as we demonstrated this motherboard handled that very heavy load without issue.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering, yes the 220W FX-9590 did in fact have lower idle numbers than the power sipping 95W FX-8320E. It's not necessarily surprising since these FX-9590's are obviously the best of the best dies, and our sample idled with an even lower voltage than the E chip.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

At this point in time, unless you are truly brand loyal, we can't in good conscience recommend spending top dollar on any AMD-based motherboard since the available processors just aren't comparable to Intel's offerings. MSI probably agrees with us, which is why they created this very affordable yet highly capable motherboard that punches way above its weight. At no point in this review did we think the 970-GAMING wasn't worth every penny that it retails for, which is a mere $100USD/$125CAD at current prices.

This motherboard is absolutely ideal for those wanting to build a highly affordable AMD system or even those with older AM3/AM3+ systems that don't yet need a total overhaul, but might benefit from the 970-GAMING's excellent overclocking potential, top-notch onboard audio solution, gamer-friendly Killer E2205 LAN controller, or even those who want dual graphics card capabilities. Touching on this last part, we are truly impressed that MSI did the engineering work necessary to bring 2-way CrossFire and 2-way SLI to this model, since the 970 chipset was designed solely with single GPU systems in mind.

Frankly, unless you really need/want a proper x16/x16 configuration (or more USB 3.0 ports) we wouldn't even consider a much pricier 990FX motherboard over this one. Yes, only two USB 3.0 ports on the back panel is a fairly disappointing, but that's a chipset limitation and you can obviously expand that connectivity with the internal USB 3.0 header and your case's built-in USB 3.0 ports.

Aside from the lack of USB 3.0 ports, the slightly sticky memory slots, and the awkward 8-pin CPU connector placement, this is a surprisingly polished motherboard with a great feature list and a really attractive price. MSI didn't skimp out on the core components either, as demonstrated by the fact that the VRM didn't explode when we installed the unsupported FX-9590 processor. Despite its 220W TDP - which is about 75% higher than the 125W chips this model was designed for - the FX-9590 ran flawlessly on the 970-GAMING. It put way more load on the power components than even our manual overclock, so we are quite confident that this motherboard will handle anything you can throw you at it.

When this board is paired up with a chip like AMD's extremely affordable and relatively low-wattage FX-8320E you get a combination that can overclock very well while offering respectable multi-core performance numbers.

If we were building an AM3+ system today, this is the motherboard that we would pick, no doubt about it. It makes every competing AMD 970 motherboard look downright mediocre by comparison. It unequivocally wins our Dam Good and Dam Good Value Awards.