MSI X79A-GD45 Plus Review: Building Up
by Ian Cutress on February 14, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- X79
MSI X79A-GD45 Plus Conclusion
When a motherboard manufacturer designs a product, they have an Intel specification to work with based on the socket used and the chipset to be used. This defines the basic list of ports to be included, and anything beyond this requires planning and investment in additional hardware. When speaking to motherboard manufacturers, the whole process from specification to mass production can take 8-12 months, meaning that manufacturers have to predict the needs of the market in advance. What gets put onto the motherboard over and above the Intel specification comes in two flavors – direct enhancement and indirect enhancement.
Direct enhancement gives more immediate features to the user. This means more network ports, more SATA ports, more USB 3.0, fan controls, a better PCIe layout and what comes in the box with the product (cables and so forth). These are features we can quantify and provide in a list, such as types of video output, or buttons directly on the motherboard.
Indirect enhancement is harder to quantify. Features that come under this heading include power phase counts, routing around the motherboard, sound enhancement, heatsink placement and stability. Each one of these is hard to test, or requires a statistical variation to provide an accurate sample. Nonetheless, indirect enhancement is a fundamental feature of the motherboard to provide a base to which motherboard manufacturers compete against each other.
For indirect enhancement, MSI has pushed the socket area down on the motherboard to give more space to components, at the expense of a PCIe x1 slot. MSI use a base Realtek audio codec and an Intel NIC for a $250 product, both of which are standard off-the-shelf components. In the direct enhancement camp, we have no additional controllers to play with, although a full complement of SATA cables is in the box, but only one SLI bridge despite the 3-way GPU layout.
MSI are attempting to bolster their position by providing an aesthetically pleasing product, as well as on the software/BIOS side. I have to commend MSI on Live Update which still requires an equal, and despite the issue of being able to set 1.8 volts on the CPU in software all too easily, the rest of the package (RAMDisk) is decent enough. It is a shame I could not get OC Genie to display any difference against a standard stock+XMP setup however.
Performance wise, due to MultiCore Turbo being enabled by default when XMP is applied, the X79A-GD45 Plus performs well in our new benchmarking suite, taking advantage when other products falter. Unfortunately our overclocking results were stunted by a relatively poor CPU and we hit a temperature limit early on.
With Ivy Bridge-E bringing little more to the table than a small IPC improvement, there are relatively few X79 refresh motherboards because the chipset is showing its age. We have reviewed a couple of the new ones, and they offer reasonable starting points for people jumping onto Intel’s enthusiast platform due to being designed for Ivy Bridge-E. At $250, MSI is aiming for the lower end of the spectrum in X79, although there are cheaper boards still available we have reviewed [1,2] as well as some that have won awards and are ~10% more expensive [1]. At this price point, users will end up purchasing for that one specific feature that a motherboard might have, or with their allegiance to a particular manufacturer. The main selling point for the MSI X79A-GD45 Plus, apart from its release aimed at Ivy Bridge-E, will be the PCIe layout with full eight DIMM memory support.
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hulu - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
In Board Features > Memory Slots, says "Up to Dual Channel". Shouldn't it be quad channel?dgingeri - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
Well, it could be useful for a high level home server with that many slots. Put a low end video card in the top, raid controller in the second, quad port 1Gb NICs in the 4th and 5th, and have the last slot available for a 10Gb card if needed. Wouldn't even need a switch to go with it. All in one, storage, network, routing, high end network. It has possibilities.Rick83 - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
But most of that you can do with 1155, and for that price you can get a board with ECC support to boot, won't need any GPU at all (unless you get a Xeon that has the GPU disabled), and still have plenty room to grow. 1155 has plenty of PCIe bandwidth, as long as most of your load is from two expansion slots. Hooking up RAID and networking directly to the CPU means that you will have two or three expansion cards that may eventually be bandwidth restrained, but even then opting for a board with a PCIe MUX would be in the same league, price-wise as this, and have plenty of bandwidth for up to four cards - and most non-GPU cards aren't really PCIe restricted. Quad GbE is one lane PCIe3, 10GbE is 2-4 lanes, 8x 6Gb SAS with software RAID over SSDs is going to need 8x PCIeV3, but realistically 4x is going to be enough, if you use hardware RAID or spinning platters.No, the only reason for this board, is if you want a cheap rendering machine. 6-8 cores and 64GB of RAM on a 250 dollar board is pretty nice. If you want gaming, you'll probably be looking at boards higher up the foodchain, as the GPUs alone will come in at around 2-3k dollars, and another 100 on the board won't really matter, if you get better sound and other nifty features.
GPU computer might be another use case, but then that's even rarer than rendering boxes, from what I've seen so far. Might be a nice little GPU compute dev workstation.
Flunk - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
There really isn't any need for this as a home server. It's total overkill. Even a Core 2 Quad can transcode multiple 1080p streams while serving files, routing and doing all the other common home server tasks. Home servers don't really need much power, most homes don't have more than 4-6 users.dgingeri - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
For total I/O and a poor man's 10Gbe switch, socket 2011 or 1366 can't be beat. That's what I mostly use my home servers for. Socket 775, 1155, or 1150 systems simply can't provide the I/O to run a software switch that includes 10Gbe.Yeah, sure, 10Gbe is hardly worth the expense in a home server. However, with a raid controller and quad drive set capable of pushing 400MB/s, it can be useful for video editing over a network drive, or a few other things.
I do it as an experiment on future uses and self training. Right now, I have three servers interconnected with 10Gb over such a poor man's 10Gbe switch running a total of 14 VMs over 3 domains with 6 domain controllers, 3 WDS servers, and some 'workstations', just to prove I could do it before I propose doing the same thing with the DNS servers in my lab. (We currently have 4 domains across 17 departments, with 3 of those 4 running Linux DNS servers that don't talk to each other. It's really annoying working on machines that cross those domains. So, I had to come up with a plan to fix it with Windows DNS and AD, and eventually migrate down to one domain. In addition, I was to come up with a way to manage user accounts through Windows AD for a single centralized vCenter server to manage our test VM hosts. I wasn't sure I could do it until I spent a weekend building all these VMs.) All of those VMs are running on iSCSI storage over 10Gbe from the storage server. I did all this with two Dell T110 II servers, one for storage and one for routing/switch, and a piecemeal FX-6100 VM host and 4 Intel CX4 10Gbe NICs.
In essence, I was just dreaming about a more capable central server for my experiments when I posted that previous comment. I could switch the storage and switch duties to a system with this board and use the Dells as further VM hosts. Maybe I'm just spoiled with all this hardware at work.
Ian Cutress - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
Copy/Paste error from my spec tables which I hand code to make it easier :) Should be fixed.Ian
Bal - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
Ok I am not one to criticize articles, but this reads REALLY poorly. I mean I am the guy who misspells every other word and uses slang, misses apostrophes etc. So I forgive everything as long as its readable. But I could not get past the first page of this review.The writer misuses "are" and "is" so often I have to reread every other sentence. He completely misses using the word "the" and it also makes you reread each sentence. Read the first two paragraphs and someone tell me I am wrong? Am I just grumpy, hungover or what?
The PC Apologist - Friday, February 14, 2014 - link
Hahaha, you must be new to Ian. He's rather infamous for his "style."It would seem that eloquence is not as valued as passion when it comes to the tech journalism industry, even for Anandtech. Refer to the 14 AIO coolers article and its comments section to see an excellent example of what I mean. There I had a little exchange with the author and boy, it’s not pretty.
Although one could say that one doesn’t read a motherboard review, or any other tech article, to brush up on one’s English grammar or writing skills, but rather just to look at some pretty pictures, learn the price/specs, and read the conclusion, it’s somewhat of a weak cop-out as one would also expect AnandTech to strive for higher standards. Reading is reading and a poorly written article is a poorly written article, regardless of topic. Other sites aren’t much better though. And to their defense, there are some decent writers, in terms of pure writing, here at AnandTech, not least of which is Anand himself. And who knows? I might even answer AnandTech’s Call for Writers one of these days. So fret not, all hope is not lost.
- The PC Apologist
thesavvymage - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
I would absolutely loathe you writing for this site. I'm sure the other writers would hate you writing with them as well, pretty much every time I see you in the comments it is because you are complaining of the competence of the english and grammar of the article.BlakKW - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
+1