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Interesting review. As the review notes though, this thing costs like 60% more than an MSI Z170 XPower (at ~$300 or so USD) and this board is up to almost $500. It will be next to impossible to justify the board from a price to performance POV. The Gigabyte G1 Gaming Z170 has at least a...

As one other person indicated, just a heads up that coil whine is a huge problem with these cards. A very high percentage seem to be getting problems. Otherwise it's a solid card.

Thanks Kyle for the review. The chipset is good, the memory controller looks like a big upgrade too, but I am worried about the high voltages 4.7 GHz might be what's possible realistically in day to day use I think. I'd guess 1.25 V is what you are going to use in day to day.

It's a pretty good value - not 970 good (Still beats it in price:performance), but a good deal nonetheless. That and spending more tends to get rapidly diminishing returns. I think it's best to wait though and see what AMD has to offer. That and even if AMD doesn't have much (I hope they have...

Sounds like it is an unstable early BIOS issue. These seem to be endemic across the board with so many manufacturers. Hopefully in a few months, it will be stable - MSI has been historically pretty good about updating it's BIOS. For now though, probably all of the refreshed boards are...

Hmm ... it seems like there are a lot of boards still with really immature BIOS/UEFIs shipping. Thanks for the review and for telling it as it is.

It seems like this is a logical step forward from the Rampage IV Extreme Black and the Maximus Extreme boards. They mostly kept things the same and didn't change much - only addition was the M.2 socket. I guess it's a matter of why change a winning formula? How would you rate this against...

As it stands, the big advantage in the 980 is not in its performance (only 10% faster than a 290X and that advantage somewhat disappears in SLI vs 290X Crossfire), but in its low power consumption, which enables a bigger OC headroom. That and your room does not feel like a sauna after a couple...

Looks like it need a few BIOS updates to get up to its potential. Hardware wise, it looks like a pretty good system that might be worth a second look. Interestingly, Asrock went with Fairchild Mosfets this round. MSI did too, although they use 55A Mosfets. There is one huge issue though I...

The reason why it happens is because Crossfire scales better than SLI. Crossfire adds about 70-85% of performance and at times, SLI adds 60-75% performance. If you were to look at 3 way and 4 way configurations, even with the 780Ti faster at single GPU solutions, 4 290X will outperform 4x...

+1 This is one of the reasons why I think HardOCP is one of the top review sites. They are willing to point out the flaws of a product. A product may be outstanding in absolute terms, but other factors like cost should be considered, along with what the competition is doing. Are power...

In absolute terms, this is a pretty decent power supply unit. But when you consider the price, it's a tougher sell, as the review notes, because of what the competition is offering.

So far, it is looking like some of the Z87 boards have had issues with DPC latency. I think that Z97 mostly solved those and X99 doesn't seem to have any issues. Imo, if it is under 150 ms, you should probably be ok. Yeah I'd agree. They've come a long way. My next motherboard is going...

Might be a decent board with the 5820k. To be honest, at the sub-$300 mark, the MSI X99 MPower seems like a stronger offering.

Thanks for the review. It is for the most part a solid board. The second NIC has issues (could perhaps be fixed with a later driver?) and the IO shield issue being a minor flaw. Is there any way to take off the aluminum IO sheld, mount the offset for the top left corner then put the...

At one point, they generally took a pretty solid stance behind their products. It was a sort of no-BS with dodging responsibility and a willingness to replace where they were clearly at fault. Over the past couple of years, things shave gotten worse I'm afraid. Today your experiences may be...

By input voltage, are you referring to the CPU offset? How much additional voltage are we talking about on the MSI and Gigabyte boards? Do you think that it is a BIOS issue or something else is at work here? I suspect that with these early BIOS, there are stability and other issues. That may...

Used mining cards 290s and 290Xs still aren't a bad buy for the money, but without some substantial price cuts, they are a poor value compared to the GTX 970.

The Z87 Maximus Formula seemed to suffer from various RTC issues. We'll have to wait and see if this one does as well. Otherwise, it fixes most of the flaws of the older version. The Mosfet heatsink too I think is copper this time, not aluminum, which was a point of contention on the previous...

Hmm... compared to the Enthoo Primo: Enthoo Primo: - All metal design (vs plastic); aluminum front; steel chasis - Better water cooling support - PSU is side mounted 780T Pros: - Cheaper - Can support XL ATX - Arguably easier to work with

Thanks a lot Eugene. I really appreciate it. This information will be quite useful for me for the upcoming build that I am planning next year. Judging by the VRM design, this may be the most powerful board in general production. The others are generally centering around 8x IR 3550. Oh...

To be honest, I'd rather just buy a car directly from the manufacturer. Dealers as a business model need to disappear. They don't really add much value and they have the tendency to screw people over. Just protecting the status quo I fear. That way we'd see a better buying experience.

Thank you for the reply. Take your time. It's not a rush. :p

Hi Eugene and welcome to the forums! Quick questions on the MSI X99 XPower, which just came out: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/X99S-XPOWER-AC.html#hero-overview 1. What are the Mosfets for the X99 XPower? The X79 Big Bang XPower II shipped with: - 20x R2J20655BNP - up1618A PWM controller...

Thanks for the review Kyle. Get some rest, you've earned it. :p I'm going to build a 5960X system later next year. Need it for video encoding. It's looking like this system seems to OC reasonably well. On that note, it does not look like the 20MB cache nor DDR4 made a huge difference in...

Relax. You seem angry and for what? Pretty much every overclocking card has a huge premium. The EVGA Classified, the Kingpins carry an even bigger premium, the Sapphire Toxic, the Galaxy HOF, the Asus Matrix, etc all have one thing in common: they all carry a premium. You are paying for a...

For the next generation, I am planning on waiting for the Lightning cards to come out, or one of the other higher end custom PCBs. I mean there have been issues. The availability apparently of higher clocking VRAM was an issue for the 780 Lightning, so it shipped with Elpida VRAM, which is...

Nah ... real question is, will Nvidia actually let people overclock it? Or will they use something like the crap with Green Light to restrict voltage? Apparently the MSI 780Ti Lightning never happened because of that. Otherwise, it's better to wait it out for AMD's solution, which hopefully...

The ASICs are taking over mining. Only some online retailers accept them. It's not widespread though.

Unfortunately, it's not so cheap in Canada. $130. Grr. http://www.amazon.ca/Stargate-Atlantis-Complete-Joe-Flanigan/dp/B004WJT5H4/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1408725061&sr=1-1&keywords=B004WJT5H4 Cheapest new is $100.

Yeah I'd have to agree. It seems like if you want good anything, go for the industrial. Good fans: Go with Delta, Nidec, San Ace, etc. The AP15 Gentle Typhoon was well regarded as it was an industrial fan. I guess good quality network cards is like that too. On an unrelated note, they've...

Hopefully they get their web infrastructure together. They've been pretty good though about releasing new BIOSes for their motherboards and for their Lightning series of GPUs. I think when the 290X Lightning had a driver issue that would cause the fans to stop spinning, they responded with 2...

Great review. Thanks for putting in the time to do it. I'm really tempted to get the X99 XPower because of this review, even though it was for the Z97. Basically, apart from crappy software, it looks like MSI has everything else perfect. - Top of the line hardware and build quality...

If you have no upper limit to your budget, the MSI 290X Lightning has no rivals when it comes to overclocking and the cooler is the best of the non-reference models. It is expensive though. There's also a custom water block for the 290X Lightning. If money is an issue, try getting the...

Dual tower, as in something like the Noctua D15. Decibel for decibel, they cool as well as 240 type radiators. As for cheap SSDs, 512 GB Crucial MX100 goes for ~$210 each. The Samsung 1tb EVO is also pretty decent. You only need 1 SSD, then copy and move files to the hard drives. Don't...

If you intend to add Fermi GPUs down the line, how good is the air flow in that case? Fermi GPUs tend to run very, very hot, especially when running GPGPU applications. I'd recommend considering the following: - Upgrading the CPU cooler to a dual tower - Using a full SSD as a boot drive...

In a word, maybe. It depends on your motherboard. Some motherboards have EFIs that can support M.2 as a boot drive. Asrock boards especially. Some motherboards do not. Check with your motherboard vendor.

There seem to be a lot of horror stories flooding the Internet about Asus tech support. Anyways, you may want to read this: http://consumerist.com/2008/07/16/10-secrets-to-getting-better-tech-support-from-asus/

My advice would be to save up and go for the 290. More powerful single card > 2 slower cards, even if CF slower exceeds single faster The reason? - Fewer issues - No reliance on driver based optimizations - Get the latest support (Mantle) - Can upgrade to a 2nd one later

That's why you want to buy from vendors that warranty based on serial number. Those are generally transferable. But yeah most GPUs today on eBay are probably heavily mined. - The fans are usually the first thing to die on a GPU. Not sure what the MBTF of a blower is. Many non-reference...