Issues - Hardware P states
I won't lie, the past two weeks with the Core i7 7900X and the X299 boards I have tested have been an absolute challenge. Memory XMP profiles would not stick, power consumption with one BIOS was OK, the other through the roof. But most of all the processor performance was all over the place. We've seen perf differences of up-to 20% in-between merely different motherboards. MSI however with it's latest BIOS seems to have found equilibrium. Now the biggest fight the two weeks was ironically game performance, it was severely lacking. Example a platform like this should run Rise of the Tomb Raider at 140 FPS at 1080p on a GeForce GTX 1080. We'd end up at 90~100 FPS. And that problem occurred with pretty much all games. I have been discussing this with the motherboard partners (as yes it is widespread) and we all agreed, it has everything to do with 'hardware P states' that Intel recommends to leave enabled for the new platform. Intel recommends certain power states to keep the TDP in line, as otherwise they simply cannot achieve that 140W TDP. For most overall tests that worked out okay enough, but specifically the toll on game performance was abysmal. Days before this launch MSI however released and provided a new BIOS, this restored the performance to what it needs to be. But as you have been able to see, the power consumption is certainly on that high-side. In the end though, the performance is there, but we do expect several BIOS updates that will have an effect in performance overall, in gaming and on power-consumption.