MSI X99A XPOWER Gaming Titanium Review

Test Setup

MSI X99A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM
Intel Core i7-6950X
3200MHz Corsair LPX
nVidia GTX980
Corsair RM1000i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10

 

Overclocking

Overclocking has been the primary reason that we held off reviewing the Titanium when it first arrived. Despite our patience it’s clear that the BIOS isn’t as fulsome as it should be. Memory overclocking, and indeed running almost any 3200 memory at all, is still a real problem with the Titanium being about as picky as any motherboard we’ve seen in recent years. The ONLY 3200 kit we have that would even let the board post was the Corsair LPX kit that they are offering as a bundle. Convenient but also terrible if you were to think that means you could buy another 3200 kit and it would work. Right now it wont, and thats, well. Not good.

Once you’ve discovered which memory kit it’s comfortable with (bit hard if you dont have kits to hand like us) then overclocking isn’t too bad, although there definitely is a voltage setting somewhere that our BIOS settings aren’t fully in control of as the temperatures went out of control far too quickly being around 10c hotter than we would really expect. Given the choice of having the Titanium benchmarks limited by its BIOS, or potentially killing our i7-6950X, it was an easy decision. Our 4.3GHz run at 1.3v were actually about 10c hotter than previous tests at 4.4 with 1.35v. Something somewhere just isnt right. At stock though the temperatures were very good hardly breaking 70c so its definitely an issues with overclocking despite the fact we manually set pretty much all of the volts that really matter at this level. The System Agent volts left on auto went right up to 1.38v….. It was stable at just over 1.15. So before you think we didn’t try, we invested a lot of time trying to bring those temps down and didnt really get anywhere close to the levels we had previously. In the end we had to have the aircon blowing straight into the case just to do our OC benches.