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

Gaming Performance

Due to the change of graphics card on the X399 test bench from an AMD RX 570 to a slightly more powerful NVIDIA GTX 980, for game testing of the MSI MEG X399 Creation we're comparing it to our AM4 chipset boards. The Ryzen 7 1700 and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X share the same Zen core architecture which does perform similarly in gaming scenarios. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X was tested in our game benchmark suite with both SMT enabled and disabled as the previous testing has shown that SMT can actually hinder in-game performance due to the lack of high thread optimization within certain games. The only anomaly came in our Total War: WARHAMMER benchmark testing with the 1950X performing considerably worse than the Ryzen 1700. Every other test provided the expected results.

Ashes of the Singularity

Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.

One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.

Thief

Thief has been a long-standing title in PC gamers hearts since the introduction of the very first iteration which was released back in 1998 (Thief: The Dark Project). Thief as it is simply known rebooted the long-standing series and renowned publisher Square Enix took over the task from where Eidos Interactive left off back in 2004. The game itself utilises the fluid Unreal Engine 3 engine and is known for optimised and improved destructible environments, large crowd simulation and soft body dynamics.

Total War: WARHAMMER

Not only is the Total War franchise one of the most popular real-time tactical strategy titles of all time, but Sega delve into multiple worlds such as the Roman Empire, Napoleonic era and even Attila the Hun, but more recently they nosedived into the world of Games Workshop via the WARHAMMER series. Developers Creative Assembly have used their latest RTS battle title with the much talked about DirectX 12 API so that this title can benefit from all the associated features that comes with it. The game itself is very CPU intensive and is capable of pushing any top end system to their limits.