MSI X299 SLI Plus Motherboard Review

Manual CPU Overclocking:

To test the MSI X299 SLI Plus motherboard’s CPU overclocking potential, we set the CPU VCore as close to 1.20V as possible. We maintain the DRAM frequency at 3200MHz to take memory stability out of the overclocking equation.

Overclocking was simple and we were able to easily achieve 4.6GHz using 1.2 volts. Any more frequency gains required pushing voltage further and that lead to unacceptable temperatures, read more about our i9 7900X overclocking experiences here.

MSI's X299 SLI Plus overclocks very similarly to the X299 Gaming M7 ACK. We opted for the Override + Offset voltage delivery mode choosing 0.9 volts as the override and +0.3v as the offset for a total of 1.2 volts. The LLC was set to Mode 2 which maintains a constant voltage as the system is loaded. These settings combined delivered a good blend of potent voltage delivery when under load and sensible voltage reduction under idle and low loads to keep power consumption down.

Overclocked Performance

Power

We leave the system to idle on the Windows 10 desktop for 5 minutes before taking a reading. For CPU load results we run AIDA64 CPU, FPU, Cache and Memory stress tests and take a reading after 5 minutes. The power consumption of our entire test system (at the wall) is shown in the chart.

Power consumption and performance were as expected for the voltage threshold and frequency achieved during overclocking.

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