I'm gonna throw this out there but Asus boards to me are crap for one reason: resource sharing. Asus LOVES to shut down ports when others are populated. They share PCIe resources the worst I've seen. If you populate the m.2 connector, other PCIe slot or the SATA express gets disabled. If you install a 5820K, only three PCIe slots are usable. Don't get me wrong, all boards do this but Asus is the worst. I hoped they'd change it up with their X99 gen II boards they just released but its the same story. They do it on their Z170 boards too. I don't get it.
Yes, they're good quality but even that's not true over just about any competitor anymore in my opinion. When X99 boards first hit the market there were Asus boards (Sabertooth) that were literally catching on fire. But they still charge more than anyone else for the same features because of their name.
ASRock is the best I've seen on X99 with getting the most out of resources. I build a lot of professional workstations on X99 and to this point I've used ASRock exclusively. The X99 WS is a fantastic board but hard to find. I've put them out with a 5820K, 64GB of RAM, a SATA m.2 SSD for OS, two 950 Pros on PCIe adapters or Intel 750s, a video card and an LSI RAID card running one or two arrays. The ASRock boards (WS, OC Formula and Fatl1ty Pro) give you four PCIe slots at 8x8x4x8 to be able to pull this off with a 5820K which is awesome, and you've still got a PCIe 2.0 slot from the chipset to use! Use a 5930K or higher and you've got another PCIe slot at your disposal.
EVGA boards are great too, granted they use PLX chips a lot but they're feature packed. My problem with EVGA is that horizontal power connector which makes it a pain to get the power cable behind the board in many cases. MSI is doing good things on X99 too. Gen1 gigabyte X99 boards were pretty rough but their new line they are just releasing now in preparation for the new Broadwell-Es look awesome for resource allocation. You can just about use every connector on the board.
The new lines everyone is releasing is including U2 connectors for Intel 750 2.5s and focusing on better PCIe resource utilization as they all release their refreshed X99 boards for Broadwell-E. ASRock is yet to come to market with their new stuff but have teased at least one new one which will get announced as early as tomorrow.
Your timing is interesting as a lot is opening up literally this week as it get presented at Computex. TbsToy, the decision should be carefully evaluated because many people look at the specs, and all those connectors, and mistakenly think they can just plug stuff in to all of them then they don't get the bandwidth they thought they'd get or worse yet the port is completely shut down because something was connected to another port. I suggest going through the manual of whatever board you're buying and make sure it'll take everything you're gonna connect to it they way you want to.
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