MSI X99A XPower Gaming Titanium Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts
Let me first say that I really do like this motherboard. MSI really has crammed everything you would want in this motherboard! You have 802.11 ac WiFi, support for quad-SLI/CrossFire, great audio, 32 Gb/s U.2 and M.2 slots, USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, lots of SATA ports and much more. I think any enthusiast would be satisfied with the feature set of this motherboard.

On top of that the overclock of this board is very solid! I was easily able to get our Core i7-5960X all the way up to 4.4 GHz stable at a 1.35V Vcore. If you are new to overclocking you can use the MSI Gaming App to easily overclock our you can use the Game Boost dial. The Game Boost dial is actually really cool and a great feature for instant overclocking.

This board sits apart from many motherboards out there because you don’t have the typical PCB, it is colored and I have to say it looks pretty awesome! There are not many motherboards out there that will look like this one! With that said, being that color the labels on this board are silver it makes them hard to read, it would be nice to see them in black so they would be easier to read.

MSI includes quite a lot of different software to enhance and make tuning your motherboard easy. Sadly though there is no unified software that bring all of this software together into one. It is sort of all over the place and that can just be annoying. It would be nice to see a revamp from MSI on this, Gigabyte recently did this and it makes finding and managing your motherboard applications much easier. The Click BIOS 5 that comes with the board is easy to use and I didn’t have any issues with it.

This brings us to price, right now you can pick up this motherboard for $419.99 at my favorite online retailer. At that price it sits at the top-end of X99 motherboards. I know that price reflects the cost of the custom-colored PCB, but I feel this board is missing one major thing and that is a PLX chip. As it sits you cannot run both the M.2 and U.2 at the same time. Other motherboards sitting at this price point do offer a PLX chip.

This motherboard is quite unique and if you are willing to spend the money you won’t be disappointed. Overall ThinkComputers gives the MSI X99A XPower Gaming Titanium Motherboard a 9 out of 10 score.

Award 9 out of 10

Pros:
– Custom-colored PCB
– Game Boost dial instant overclocking
– 32 Gb/s U.2 and M.2 support
– Metal shielding on PCIe, RAM & M.2 slots
– Solid overclocking
– Lots of extra software addons
– Clear CMOS and power and reset buttons on the board
– PCIe dip-switches
– Voltage checkpoints

Cons:
– No RGB lighting
– U.2 and M.2 ports cannot be used at the same time (No PLX chip)
– Writing on the board hard to see
– Software could be better organized

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