MSI X99S Gaming 7 Review

Introduction

The latest Haswell-E CPUs have certainly proved popular, with the massive leap forwards in performance they afford causing many of us to consider how many kidneys we actually need and if living in a shed is something we could tolerate. So far the motherboards we’ve reviewed have all been up at the heavy end of the price scale. Enter the MSI X99S Gaming 7, a much more affordable offering that promises to bring the world of 8-core awesomeness just a little bit closer to those of us who don’t own large media companies or work in the city.

It’s also a great opportunity to discover if the ASUS OC socket really makes a difference to the overclocking capabilities of those motherboards, or if it’s just hype.

Time to pull up a chair, silence the dog with a juicy bone and see what the MSI X99S Gaming 7 brings to the party.

Technical Specifications

Casting our well-trained eye down the specifications list for the Gaming 7 it appears that everything is in order. Huge memory speeds and capacity and readily available, there are plenty of USB sockets, and four PCI Express slots. There are also, as is proving more and more common, a wealth of SATA 6Gb/s ports and even SATA Express support.