14 DAY TRIAL // You'd think that motherboard makers would never have much in the way of boasting rights, since no matter how good their products are, the performance comes, nonetheless, from the CPU, GPU and memory. MSI, however, begs to differ.
Since the implementation of the PCI Express root complex, memory slots and every other interface is ultimately up to them, motherboards have the most say in how powerful a PC can ultimately be.
This is translated into limits which can be achieved by the central processing unit, graphics cards and random access memory modules.
There is a reason why mainboard makers like to rave about solid capacitors and all other high-end components of their gaming motherboards.
Micro-Star International is particularly vocal about its Military Class components. By extension, it likes to sponsor overclocking sessions and contests. Here is the latest.
DDR4 memory driven to record-breaking speed
DDR4 memory is normally rated at 2,133 MHz, but it can go a lot higher than that, just like DDR3 can go far beyond the 1,066 MHz and 1,333 MHz standard. Same for 1,800-rated RAM.
In theory, DDR4 makers could eventually push the modules well above 4 GHz or even 5. After all, if DDR3 can exceed 3 GHz by figurative miles, DDR4 can't afford to do any worse in comparison.
However, DDR4 is still in its infancy, with its top capacity potential of 16 GB per DIMM not set to be reached until next year, in 2015.
The performance of 2,133 MHz might be well ahead of a DDR3 2,133 MHz module, especially at 1.2V instead of 1.5/1.65V, but overclocked DDR3 still rules the gaming market.
MSI's latest overclocking record could finally put an end to that. Its MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard was able to allow overclocker Toppc to push Kingston Hyper X DDR4 4GB memory to 4,032 MHz.
This, more than anything else, shows how good DDR4 is on any gaming system and, more than that, workstations where multi-tasking and heavy calculations are the norm.
The MSI X99S SLI PLUS
This motherboard has Gigabit LAN ethernet from Intel, support for NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU card setups (hence the name), Turbo M.2 SSD support (up to five times the performance of SATA III 6 Gbps HDDs/SSDs), SATA Express (SATA 10 Gbps), and of course, Military Class 4 components.
The all-black motherboard is up for sale at $215 / €176 - €215, but you'll probably end up paying more for the DDR4 if you buy enough to fill all those eight slots. Which is the whole point of high-end hardware.
