QNAP TS0-253B
Plexible media storage.
PRICE $ 589 www.msi.com.au
As one of the most affordable boards in the roundup, we have to say that the MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK kicks some serious butt. It may not have quite as many features as other boards, but when it comes to gaming performance, this thing blew it out of the park, and we didn’t have to spend hours trying to extract this level of performance.
Like all of the boards, it’s a standard ATX, but MSI has managed to squeeze plenty of PCIe lanes onto the board. There are four steel-reinforced full length x16 lanes, along with another twin x1 lanes. It’s got the full eight memory slots (some X299 budget boards will only ship with four), and these are rated to handle up to DDR44000 when overclocked. Speaking of which, we used the MSI overclocking knob to hit a maximum CPU speed of 4.6GHz, though we did notice that this would drop over time, likely due to thermal throttling. If you want to overclock Core-X CPUs, you’re going to need some extreme cooling solutions. Tweakers will love the onboard power, reset, BIOS flashback and voltage monitoring points, all very welcome inclusions at this price. The power system is all digital, and has twelve phases in total. Along with the usual 24- pin and 12-pin power plugs, there’s an auxiliary 4-pin power connector, which is apparently for extra video cards.
Given the price, we can forgive the six SATA 3 ports, even though X299 has a default of eight, but there’s also a U.2 port for high speed drives. Twin M.2 slots are hidden behind a chunky heatsink, which is mounted on a unique hinge system. Simply unscrew the two screws on one end, and the entire heatsink folds outwards. The heatsinks are nice and thick as well, unlike some of the 1mm heatsinks found on other boards. The cooling around the CPU power subsystem isn’t exactly huge compared to the competition, but we didn’t have any heat related crashes during our many benchmarks.
Killer has delivered the network nuts and bolts, with a Killer Ethernet port and Killer 802.11ac Wi-Fi. As for USB, at the rear IO panel there is one Gen2, Type C, one Gen2, Type A and four Gen1, Type A. There’s also another three USB 2.0 ports for lower speed devices, which sit next to the antennae connection points.
Finally, audio uses MSI’s standard ‘AUDIO BOOST 4 PRO’ solution, which is based on the ever-popular Realtek ALC 1220 with the usual upgraded capacitors, PCB isolation, and keeping
if you want to overclock Core-X CPUs, you’re going to need some extreme cooling solutions
the left and right channels on different levels of the PCB. In other words, it’s doing basically what everybody else is doing with this chipset, and listening tests placed it identically to other boards.
It may not have quite as many features as the other boards, but this thing is fast. It wiped the floor with the other boards in around half of our benchmarks. As such, it’s a great, semiaffordable way to start your Core-X build. BENNETT RING