MSI X99S XPOWER AC (LGA 2011-3) Motherboard Review

Overclocking

We couldn’t get our i7 5960X stable at 4.5GHz on the MSI X99S XPower AC, in the end we settled on 4.4GHz. Strangely we had the same problem on the ASUS Rampage V Extreme yet both Gigabyte X99 boards managed 4.5GHz. My theory is that the Gigabyte boards weren’t fully stable at 4.5GHz but didn’t crash for some unknown reason, this is shown by the fact their performance is actually often worse than the 4.4GHz results posted by the other boards. It is also possible our chip has degraded from high volts and high heat, although that seems unlikely in such a short space of time.

Either way the MSI X99S XPower AC is a great board for overclocking and if we had more time to play around we could have pushed more from this board, especially on the memory side. Remember that this board holds overclocking world records for a reason! 4.4GHz is a fairly good result for a Core i7 5960X although we’ve seen some people get around 4.6GHz with good chips and decent water cooling. Overclocking with Haswell-E is CPU limited rather than board-limited so comparing overclocks on X99 boards is a fairly redundant thing to do: they are all limited by the CPU.