Digital Power Design |
Since quite some time MSI has been equipping its boards with digital power designs. On the X99A Godlike Gaming there are only high-end components when it comes to the power design. There are for example PWM controllers from Intersil as well as ICs from Powervation. Other than that there are "Dark Caps", which offer 10'000 operating hours, which is up to three times as much than what you get from standard caps. |
|
| |
Audio Boost 3 |
Audio
Boost is MSIs interpretation of good onboard audio. In this case there
is a Realtek ALC1150 codec, which has been equipped with an EMI shield
and apart from that, there are high quality capacitors. Furthermore you find a 6.35 millimeter jack to directly attach high-end headphones. |
|
| |
MSI Steel Armor |
There are five PCIe x16 slots on this particular board, which have been equipped with a steel frame. If you place a large and heave gaming graphics card, while the board is mounted in a case, you will notice, that over time the slots starts to bend by a little bit. Furthermore, when transporting a system it can happen, that the PCIe slot break by the sheer force, when somebody is not dealing carefully with an assembled system. In both cases the steel armor should help increasing protection of the PCIe slots. |
|
| |
M.2 Support
|
The new MSI X99A Godlike Gaming motherboard
features an M.2 slot. This motherboard can be equipped with an SSD in
M.2 format and it is wired directly to the X99 PCH via four PCI Express
lanes. In other words there is up to 32 Gbps bandwidth. |
|
|
|
MSI Dragon Armor |
MSI equipped their X99A Godlike Gaming with a shield spanning over a large part of the PCB. Integrated into this shield there is an RGB LED lighting, which allows for nice, indirect illumination. Apart from that all heatsinks have been integrated into the "MSI Dragon Armor" whereas the cooling blocks have been interconnected by a heatpipe. |
|
| |
OC Genie 4
|
OC Genie is MSI's automatic
overclocking feature. By the touch of this button, the board is
automatically going to overclock the CPU installed up to a certain
extent. |
|
ASUS X99 Sabertooth Review 