The MSI MEG X399 Creation Motherboard Review: The New 16-Phase Shark In Town

Overclocking

Experience with MSI MEG X399 Creation

While the MSI MEG X399 Creation is primarily marketed towards content creators and gamers looking for a rather comprehensive and feature-laden board as a foundation to build upon, the board does have some appeal to overclockers as well. The board has a basic overclockers toolkit which consists of a reset and power button, as well as MSI’s Game Boost automatic OC dial. Given that the board does feature a 19-phase power delivery split into sixteen phases for the CPU (using doublers running at 8+0) and 3 dedicated phases for the memory, the board could be suitable for the more extreme overclockers. All that aside, overclocking on the X399 Creation is made easy thanks to the user-friendly and highly intuitive MSI Click BIOS 5. All the relevant settings overclocking settings are there within the BIOS and although alternatives are more suitable for the more fervent such as the ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme, the MSI MEG X399 Creation is certainly highly capable of pushing our Threadripper 1950X to its limit.

Overclocking a Ryzen Threadripper 1950X processor on this board is likely to max out the silicon and our cooling capabilities long before the board starts to show its limitations. Increasing the CPU core voltage as it does increases the power consumption, and in the case of a processor such as the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, power draw can be essentially doubled.

Methodology

Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with POV-Ray and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.

For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (100ºC+). Our test bed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.

Overclocking Results

The MSI MEG X399 Creation is rather conservative with core voltage at default with a reported CPU core voltage of 1.176 V at full load. I was surprised to see that when using the Game Boost automatic overclocking function that MSI actually used more modest core voltages within their setting profiles, as usually vendors tend to overvolt massively. Maybe the timid core voltages are a consequence of the increased power draw on a 16-core/32-thread powerhouse such as the 1950X, and MSI didn’t want to over-encumber the boards circuitry unnecessarily; whereas on a more modest desktop platform such as X470, where it matters less in comparison to a platform such as X399. It is pleasant to see that MSI has taken measures to remain controlled in the way it has applied its Game Boost settings and hopefully, this marks a change from MSI overestimating CPU core voltage by ridiculous numbers on their chipsets as sometimes it’s just a step too far.

Settings-wise the only two overclocking profiles that failed under stability testing came when our Ryzen Threadripper 1950X was set to 4.0 GHz at Game Boost 10, and Game Boost 11 which tried to achieve a more audacious 4.1 GHz. While it is possible to achieve this with a good quality cooler, our 1950X didn’t like the conservative core voltage at 4.0GHz, which when bumped up during manual overclocking actually proved stable.

Our Ryzen Threadripper 1950X sample remained unstable at 4.1 GHz, although it POSTed no problems at all with a CPU core voltage of 1.437 V (it is generally recommended that CPU voltage remains below 1.45 V for longevity reasons). At 4.1 GHz before the system's stability became an issue, our power meter reached a reading of just under 400 W which is a massive increase of just over 50% over what was given at the default stock settings. The performance increase in our PovRay benchmark was gradual with no throttling on our test bench. The one questionable result we did see was on MSI’s Game Boost 4 pre-defined setting (x38.5); which we expect is just an anomaly.