MSI X79A-GD45 (8D)

In the land of Intel’s X79 platform, it’s always a battle of how much you can pack into a product. Be it features or whatsoever, the LGA2011 platform is an expensive platform and warrants a premium but the people that actually benefit from this platform and technology do not want all the flash that a gaming setup brings. Such is the requirements of professionals and power users that build their systems around a robust motherboard that can house their Sandy Bridge-E chip to perform day to day number crunching. As we’ve seen in our previous X79 motherboard reviews (here and here), the X79 chipset on its own is capable of wonderful things and when spiced up by board manufacturers, it can really be a very powerful setup even at its most bare. Today we have another supposed entry-level (and that is in by no means a bad thing) X79 motherboard for the Sandy Bridge E processors from MSI, the X79A-GD45 (8D). We’re excited to see what one of the big 3 board vendors offer in this product. Let’s get this review going and let’s make this showy!

Micro Star International or more popularly known as MSI has had a nice run in the motherboard, graphics card and notebook market in the last few years up to now and have cemented themselves in motherboard market as part of the big three motherboard vendors in the world. With a constantly evolving product line that features a signature line of attributes like Military Class components amongst others, MSI has a solid reputation for churning out robust and stable products that cater to budget consumers all the way to high-profile enthusiasts and gamers. As we’ve stated we have the baby amongst their LGA2011 offering, the X79A-GD45 (8D), the 8D denoting the use of 8 DIMM slots for maximum memory capacities up to 128GB (if 16GB sticks become available, you can cram up to 8 of them). Let’s check out the specs sheet and photos and get to the test results.

[toggle title=”SPECIFICATIONS”]

Socket	2011
CPU (Max Support)	i7
AM3 CPU Ready	N/A
FSB/BCLK/Hyper Transport Bus	100MHz
Chipset	Intel® X79
DDR3 Memory	DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1800*/2133*/2400*(OC)
DDR2 Memory	N/A
Memory Channel	Quad
DIMM Slots	8
Max Memory (GB)	128
PCI-Ex16	5
PCI-E Gen	Gen3 (16, 16, 8), Gen2 (1, 1)
PCI-Ex4	N/A
PCI-Ex1	1
PCI	N/A
IDE	N/A
SATAIII	2
SATAII	4
RAID	0/1/5/10
LAN	10/100/1000*1
TPM	1
USB 3.0 ports (Rear)	2
USB 2.0 ports (Rear)	6
Audio ports (Rear)	6+Coaxial / Optical SPDIF
Serial ports (Rear)	N/A
Parallel ports (Rear)	N/A
1394 ports (Rear)	N/A
eSATA	N/A
Display Port	N/A
VGA	N/A
HDMI	N/A
DVI	N/A
VGA Max Share Memory (MB)	N/A
DirectX	N/A
Form Factor	ATX
DrMOS	N/A
DrMOS II	Y
APS	Y
Sideport Memory	N/A
SLI	Y
3-way SLI	Y
4-way SLI	N/A
Hybrid SLI	N/A
CrossFire	Y
Hybrid CrossFire	N/A
Dual Graphics	N/A
D-LED2	N/A
Green Power Genie	N/A

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IMAGE GALLERY

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The last few iterations of MSI’s motherboards saw the company adhere to a black and blue color scheme. The same still applies to the X79A-GD45(8D) we have today, clad in a dark PCB with blue slots accentuating the motherboard as well as heatsink. MSI’s Military Class III logo is the center of attention on the heatsink which cools a 10-phase VRM. Alongside the LGA2011 socket is the quad-channel DIMM slots, 8 in total which should happily accept up to 128GB of total system RAM as we’ve mentioned already. The PCH heatsink is cooled by a large passive heatsink with the MSI logo.  Nothing special on the back, with only the giant backplate of the LGA2011 socket proving any sort of irregularity in the otherwise dark PCB.

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Starting out our tour-around of the motherboard, we start off with the rear expansion ports. First thing we notice is the inclusion of legacy PS/2 ports which should please overclockers as well as business-oriented professionals. The small button is the CLR CMOS button. Going further right we have the SPDIF ports along with six USB2.0 ports followed by an Ethernet port and a pair of USB3.0 SuperSpeed ports supplied by a NEC D720200 controller. The back is rounded off by an 8-channel audio output ports powered by an Realtek ALC892 onboard solution.

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Checking out the bottom half of MSI’s X79A-GD45 (8D) we can see a good number of PCI-Express slots. Five in total but only two of which operate in full X16 speed, the 1st and 4th from the top are the full x16 speeds whilst the last one is x8. The different looking ones in-between are x1 slots along with the lone black slot. Further below we see connection headers, from the right we have 2 front USB2.0 headers, a USB3.0 header, front panel connectors, the OC Genie switch, an onboard power button. Next to these are the JDLED and JTPM headers. If you haven’t noticed it yet, there is no digital binary LED display on this board. This what the JDLED is used for, refer to the manual for pin-out configuration if you plan on hard-modding your own. The JTPM is used for connecting Trusted Platform Modules. Further left are the COM port header and front audio header which are standard fare for any modern motherboard.

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Turning the board a bit, we go back to the SATA connectors. We have six in total powered off the X79 chipset, two of which are SATA3, capable of 6Gbps transfer speeds and the rest are SATA2. Right below these is a MOLEX connector that supplies supplementary power to the board’s PCI-Express slots. This is important if you’re using multiple GPU configurations especially high-powered cards.

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Up top, we again have a nice shot of that nice heatsink on the VRM. We spot a couple of fan headers and the ATX power connector right beside this and if you look really closely just wee below the heatsink you can see a LED array for displaying power load status.

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Here’s a couple of parting shots before we move on.

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MSI packages this board in a distinctive box with the large Military Class III logo on front. Feature icons are included up top and a large World Record seal can be seen on upper center. The other side of the box we see a healthy list of marketing text and bullets.

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Included in the package are 3 pairs of SATA cables, documentation, installation disc, backplane and two bonus: an overclocking guide and a certificate. The overclocking guide is similar to what Intel includes in their media kit but with lots more information. The certificate included is a testament to the Military Class III’s stability and quality denoting the tests passed by these motherboards.

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A shot of the motherboard out of the package.

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And here’s a walk-through of the BIOS/UEFI section.

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There is a lot to cover in this section but we’d leave that to another post. In summary though, we have a very unique UEFI from MSI in their ClickBIOS II interface. A screenshot function is included for taking settings screenshots for troubleshooting or sharing overclocking information. Speaking of overclocking, there is a hefty amount of settings presented in just one page and though its nice to see everything upfront, a little organization would’ve helped keep the interface short and concise. The boot order on the upper right can be dragged to select the boot order which is a nice touch.

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TEST SETUP & OVERCLOCKING

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Processor	Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition
Motherboards	MSI X79A-GD45(8D), ECS X79R-AX, ASRock X79 Extreme3
Cooling	Intel RTS2011LC ALC
Power Supply	Antec EarthWatts Platinum 550W
Memory	Kingston HyperX Genesis Quad-Channel DDR3-1600
Video Cards	Palit Jetstream GTX670
Hard Drive	Corsair Performance Pro 128GB SSD
Operating System	Windows 7 64-bit SP1

We would like to thank Intel, Kingston Technologies Inc., ECS , MSI and Tech Porn for providing the parts and equipment for this review.

Setting up the MSI X79A-GD45(8D) is pretty easy. Same goes for any other motherboard if you’re quite familiar with the process. So moving on to our test setup we use a 3960X which has been with us for quite some time now along with its partner, the RTS2011LC closed-loop liquid cooling solution by Intel and Asetek.

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Overclocking the MSI X79A-GD45(8D) was a new experience to me since I haven’t had the pleasure of screwing around with the ClickBIOS UEFI. And to be honest, I kind of find it adorable and irritating at the same time. The interface itself is totally likable, everything is functional and responsive and well placed. My biggest woes though are the organization and sub-sectioning of the options. You have to dig through an entire page to forward yourself into an option and if you’re already 3-4 layers down, it starts to get frustrating especially if you’re overclocking. The overclocking options itself are rich with lots of option for tweaking your board and processor. Options for manual voltage input and an extensive loadline calibration feature is available. This is also where it goes so terribly horrible as the overclocking page is so long. MSI could’ve opted for a voltage and memory subsection to easily navigate through and from when overclocking. Some might be used to this kind of interface but when you do it a hundred times an hour to get to that overclocking sweet spot, its already tiring. MSI does however address this with its Control Center and desktop version of the ClickBIOS UI. The MSI Control Center grants users access to multiple overclocking options right in their desktop and changes are usually immediate. We love the idea and I’m sure some will also but serious overclockers will always revert to the BIOS when doing extensive option changes.

Speaking of BIOS, MSI features a dual-BIOS switch which is a nice feature to have. Anyone whose flashed an HD6950 to an HD6970 will know the joys of having such a feature. This enables users to easily switch to a fall-back or backup BIOS in the event that the primary BIOS fails or gets corrupted.

Getting back to overclocking, we managed to bring our i7-3960X to a stable 4.5Ghz OC at 1.35v. We tried to push this board further but temps we’re starting to reach the limits so we backed off to a more safer OC. We managed to get the board going as much as 5Ghz with only our sorta-puny RTS2011LC so that’s a testament to the overclocking potential of this motherboard coupled with proper cooling (validation).

PERFORMANCE

[tabs tab1=”SiSoft SANDRA” tab2=”wPrime” tab3=”Cinebench” tab4=”SuperPI” tab5=”Video Conversion”] [tab]

SiSoft’s SANDRA is a benchmarking, testing and system information application which provides plenty of options in gaining information regarding your system. For this test, we gauge the raw computational power of the CPU with the Processor Arithmetic benchmark based on the Whetstone and Dhrystone test. Both tests run completely within the processor so it gives a good picture of how a processor performs.

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On stock, this MSI motherboard quickly topples everything we have on our list including Intel’s own motherboard. Overclocking results are also very good easily ranking next 2nd to Intel’s.

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wPrime is a multi-threaded benchmarking application designed to measure the raw computational power of a CPU. It can be configured to run on a custom number of threads to accomodate multi-core CPUs.

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Again, stock performance easily demolishes everyone else. We’ve highlighted the Intel stock result to show the previous leading score.

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Maxon offers a nice benchmark tool called Cinebench which really stresses your entire system to render a very complex scene. The output score is completely unique to Cinebench but allows us to have a rough idea of how the CPU works with 3D rendering tasks.

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MSI is continuing its onslaught on our charts, topping Cinebench runs by decent margin in stock performance and just by a hairline against Intel’s DX79SI motherboard.

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SuperPI is another benchmarking tool that utilizes the pure computational power of a CPU. This test however is purely single-threaded and shows us the performance of a single core which gives us a good picture of how a processor performs on similar tasks.

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We see very respectable results here, typical of any X79 board so there should be no question if this board is better in terms of pure computational performance against these other boards.

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We use a 150MB 1080p MP4 video and convert it to standard Apple Generic Format in Xilisoft to see how video conversion performance on these board goes.

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In our video conversion test, the MSI X79A-GD45 (8D) really stood out. With over 10 second difference over other boards we wondered if there’s a problem and bumped the data against multiple re-tests and yielded the same results so we’re really impressed. Overclocking results are still tops easily tying again with Intel’s own solution which are known for performing so well.

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CONCLUSION

Being in the entry-space of MSI’s X79 offering, the MSI X79A-GD45 (8D) doesn’t have much going for it in terms of features. What you get for your money though is solid stability which MSI certifies with its Military Class components. In professional situations, this is an important factor for consideration and along with its performance, this board still packs enough wallop to make its way to the top of our charts. Not to mention you’re getting overclocking potential that has set world records. So is it worth it?

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Coming in locally at Php11,500 or $220-240 it’s just a bit more pricey than ASRock’s entry-level motherboard. This motherboard however demonstrates sheer performance even beating out Intel’s 300$ DX79SI motherboard. Another consideration is the overclocking potential this board gives us, easily reaching 5Ghz with just a few flicks on the UEFI BIOS. With proper cooling, any SB-E chip could reach its maximum potential with this motherboard. The savings had on this board can be used for a good water-cooling loop, hard drive or graphics card.

We’d be honest and say we don’t really find anything terribly negative with this board. Minor details we want improved or corrected are present though. First up is the lack of the on-board LED status display. This can be of great help and coupled with the dual-BIOS feature should be a great team. Skimping on the on-board reset button is another thing we missed. Focusing on layout and placement issues, the LED power status is obscured by the VRM heatsink which makes this feature totally useless. The main CPU fan header is also placed too far from the socket area, people who prefer hiding cables would prefer a more closer location. The USB3.0 header on the lower edge is also easily knocked out by any long graphics card that would probably be placed there along with the other headers in that area. We also like to see at least an ALC898 in here.

Minor nitpicking aside, everything seems to be going nicely for MSI. They have an affordable and attractive board that performs like a beast. If you are gunning down the X79 path or probably heard rumors of Ivy Bridge-E and want to go X79 because of that but don’t want to tread on high-priced solution, the MSI X79A-GD45(8D) provides a good platform. This motherboard is backed by a 3-year warranty.

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HOT

[checklist]

• Great performance out of the box
• Very good overclocker
• Rich overclocking options
• Reasonably priced
• 8-DIMM option

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NOT

[badlist]

• ClickBIOS II’s large array of options might scare off regular users
• Front USB3.0 header not available when last PCI-E slot is populated with large graphics card

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