MOTHERBOARDS

High-performance motherboards reviewed.

X99S SLI Plus

$233 MSI

MSI’s well-priced SLI Plus is the among the cheapest X99 boards I’ve seen. It’s been a firm favorite of mine ever since, and one of the best motherboard partners for the Core i7-5820K processor I know of.

Yet the battle for first place was still a very close thing, because ASRock are offering a very tempting alternative with their X99M Extreme4. Additionally, the SLI Plus doesn’t top the tables in any benchmarks—and in my Battlefield 4 benchmark was languishing around the bottom in terms of average framerates. All this might lead you to wonder why it’s getting the top score, but the other key metric in gaming performance is the minimum framerate.

At 66fps this budget hero runs over 10fps higher than the minimum framerate of every other board I’ve tested, and that is going to give you a smoother experience playing games. But even to refer to this board as ‘budget’ is to do MSI a disservice. They’re asking for no compromise on your behalf here. You still get all the important Haswell-E features you could want. There’s a full eight DIMM slots for your quad-channel DDR4 memory, there’s a SATA Express port and an x4 M.2 connection to cater for all your PCIe storage demands now and later on.

You also get full SLI support and CrossFireX too. You can’t run your graphics cards across all four of the PCIe slots available, but it will comfortably run up to three graphics cards working together, all running directly from the CPU’s available PCIe 3.0 lanes. That’s a big fat tick for serious gamers.

In general CPU performance terms it’s no great shakes. The SLI Plus was never far from the top boards I’ve tested, but isn’t going to win any performance awards. The weakest showing was in the overclocking stakes—it came joint bottom in that test with a maximum frequency of 4.3GHz.

ASRock’s micro ATX board is similarly priced, but isn’t quite as powerful at stock clockspeeds and doesn’t have the benefit of the full eight DIMM slots for future memory upgrades, or the extra PCIe 3.0 sockets. MSI’s X99S SLI Plus is thus my pick of the current crop of X99 boards for pairing with the sixcore 5820K.

It will comfortably run up to three graphics cards working together