Best High-End Motherboard For i7-6850k

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DrGreer

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I've been doing a lot of shopping around and I've decided that the price performance of the i7-6850k is great. My use cases are VR gaming and running machine learning algorithms such as neural nets. To that end I'll be either purchasing a gtx1080 with the desired ability to add multiple 1080s in the future via SLI or the new Titan X Pascal. The worth of the Titan X Pascal is a discussion for another thread.

My question is, what is the absolute best x99 compatible motherboard out there? I do intend to make use of m2 and/or u2 for the main drive and would like to start out with at least 32 gigs of RAM (Fastest RAM possible and ability to go up to 128 would be nice). I'm also going to be doing a lot of virtualization of operating systems using hypervisors. Of course the first thing I think is Asus but whening I look at reviews on Newegg, they're riddled with so many people having problems with the boards dying and slots going bad. I thought I'd settled on the GIGABYTE GA-X99-Designare EX but I'm just not sure. One good review I read for that board said...

"I selected the Designare EX because it was the only board that can support two GPUs in SLI with full x16 bandwidth while driving an M.2 SSD and a PCIe sound card. The latter is generally the sticking point, as the vast majority of boards now hide the PCIe 2.0 x1 slot under a primary GPU slot, which makes it impossible to properly use the sound card. Surprisingly, the ASUS Deluxe II has the M.2 port sharing resources with the second GPU slot, which in theory means SLI performance will be degraded. This board can manage that while supporting M.2 and U.2 drives without any loss of capability! In this way, I can keep my Samsung 950 Pro and upgrade to a U.2 drive in the future without compromise."

Some other reviews have complained that there are no post codes, that the BIOS menus are sluggish (Not really a big deal), long POST times, and some driver issues related to networking.

What are the absolute best x99 boards and how do they compare to this Designare board? I've even considered buying a multi-CPU socket workstation board but it isn't quite obvious whether or not they support i7 Broadwell-E chips; however, if I could be convinced that one of those boards would reign supreme in the x99 world, I would consider it further as of course the idea of being able to pop in a second i7-6850k later down the road is appealing.

What do we think about the best high-end boards for this CPU?

Thanks everyone.
 
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Link - https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?81623-Which-ASUS-boards-have-the-PLX-chip-for-16x16-GPU-s

this is from 12-30-15

" PLX" is a bit of a misnomer, PLX Technologies is (was) a manufacturer of circuit components like PCIe switches and PCIe bridges and PCIe multiplexers. What "PLX" or "PLX chip" means to most people is a chip which splices a single physical PCIe slot (or lane, or group of lanes) into more logical PCIe slots or lanes.

Short version is that it doesn't matter how many physical slots are mounted on the motherboard or how many lanes can be allocated in the BIOS because the processor can simultaneously address a maximum of 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes worth of bandwidth under best conditions. There are zero performance...
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helicon

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This question is going to take ALOT of research on your part depending on what you want to do with the board.

The ASUS Rampage edition 10 and the MSI Godlike gaming X99 boards pretty much come with all the bells and whistles anyone would ever need in the x99 platform. Do you plan on using all of the features available on these boards? Well, that' up to you.

I'd start with those two boards - you may find out you're just burning money on features you don't need. If you do, work your way down to the less expensive ones. You can filter SLI on newegg.

Also, alot of negative reviews come from people who have no idea how to tune a motherboard.
 
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DrGreer

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What features might I need? I need...

  • Maximum performance with OC capability for CPU & RAM.
    2/3/4way SLI so I can keep adding GPUs.
    m2 and/or u2 (Is it possible to RAID multiple m2 or u2 and yeah that does sound a bit crazy?).
    At least 4 SATA for RAID10 sata setup.
    USB 3.1 is a must.
    As many PCIe slots and as many at x16 for all the graphics cards and m2/u2 and who knows what else (I also do auto production so a special audio interface will be in order down the line).

My resource intensive uses...

  • VR Gaming.
    VR Game development.
    Machine learning algorithms (Heavy on CPU/GPU/RAM/GPU RAM and requires memory speed).
    Running multiple OS at the same time (Think Xen/Qubes/Etc.).
    Audio & video production.
    3D simulation involving robotics and the machine learning algos.

I've looked over the specs of the mobos a hundred times already and it seems like a little give and take here and there so I mostly wind up looking at reviews except where it comes to the workstation boards which seems to have superior PCIe capability. The dual CPU socket thing seems like it's probably a bad idea. The way I see it, here are the boards to choose from in descent from most expensive to least:


  • Asus X99-E-10G WS
    ASRock X99 WS-E/10G
    MSI X99A GODLIKE GAMING CARBON (Does the Carbon edition differ in any specs?)
    Asus Rampage V Edition 10
    ASRock X99 Extreme11
    Gigabyte GA-X99-GAMING 5 (Not stocked on newegg right now for some reason but can find elsewhere)
    Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX

Such an impossible decision.
 
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helicon

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Sounds like you only need to choose between the MSI X99A GODLIKE GAMING or the Asus Rampage V Edition 10.

You can youtube what other people have done with M.2 and RAID....but what's the point of even doing this?

You want audio production? Gonna need an audio card or interface.

You only get 40 lanes with an i7-6850k or higher, so you'll be running multiple graphics cards in X8 but most likely X4 seeing as you want to jam as many things as possible into those M.2 and U.2 ports.

 
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DrGreer

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What about the quote I put in my first post about running 2x SLI in x16 while running m2 and a sound card? It was "I selected the Designare EX because it was the only board that can support two GPUs in SLI with full x16 bandwidth while driving an M.2 SSD and a PCIe sound card."

I will likely have 1 m2 or u2 drive and then a RAID 10 on SATA (4 drives). Why those 2 boards? I read in some of the other boards they brag about being able to run much in x16. What about the boards that are even more expensive than those 2?
 
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helicon

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"To that end I'll be either purchasing a gtx1080 with the desired ability to add multiple 1080s in the future via SLI or the new Titan X Pascal."

This is what you stated in your OP, you also stated you were curious about using M.2 RAID.

Considering I don't know how many GPU's you want, or M.2 drives, and that only 40 lanes are possible - it appears you'll be running those in X8 or X4 configuration should you go with more than 2 GPU's and 1 M.2.

At this point, it's quite obvious the research is up to you considering how you are going to configure this system. You know what you want for your application, how many GPU's, how many M.2 drives.

You likely aren't going to get your RAM up to anything past 2800MHz if you decide later you want to upgrade the mobo to 128GB of ram, this is due to the CPU's memory controller. So no sense in wasting money on 3300MHz 14 latency kits should you decide to do this.

- I'm not trying to come off brash here, but what you are asking at this point should be researched on your behalf, Dr.




 
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DrGreer

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So... Upon further research I discovered the magic of PLX chips of which only the Asus X99-E-10G WS and Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX have (The Asus as 2 of them). This allows x16 across the PCIe 3 slots even if your CPU only has 28 lanes. The main reason I decided on the i7-6850k was because it's the cheapest Broadwell-E to have 40 lanes. So if I go with one of those 2 motherboards I might even reconsider the CPU. This is all giving me a headache but at least I've narrowed my motherboard search down a bit (For various reasons) to...

**Asus X99-E-10G WS
MSI X99A GODLIKE GAMING CARBON
Asus Rampage V Edition 10
*Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX

The * denotes PLX chips. Do I need the 40 lanes if I go with one of those? It would seem maybe not. What other benefits might I gain by sticking with the i7-6850k besides clock speed? Could the RAM speed be affected by this property? A note on RAM: I saw in a video that the amount of RAM I have should be greater than my GPU's RAM. I'm starting out with 32GB and assuming a get a Titan X Pascal that has 12GB DDR5 and I plan to later add a second, that's 32 so at that point I would double it to 64GB DDR4 and maybe just stop all the upgrading there if it's going to affect my RAM speed. I'd like to know people's thoughts on the boards I've narrowed down to, PLX, the CPU lanes of the 6850k, and RAM speeds as they all pertain to these boards.

Edit: As for the question of "How many" if I go with a Titan X I'll likely only ever SLI 2 of them. If I go with a 1080 I'll only likely ever want to SLI 3 of them. As for m2/u2 I'm starting out with just 1 and if the board supports it two of the same types I'd put a second in RAID 0. I'm also always going to have a SATA RAID 10 installed (4 Drives) for the bulk of my storage but will obviously want to run OS and software on m2/u2.
 
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helicon

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Link - https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?81623-Which-ASUS-boards-have-the-PLX-chip-for-16x16-GPU-s

this is from 12-30-15

" PLX" is a bit of a misnomer, PLX Technologies is (was) a manufacturer of circuit components like PCIe switches and PCIe bridges and PCIe multiplexers. What "PLX" or "PLX chip" means to most people is a chip which splices a single physical PCIe slot (or lane, or group of lanes) into more logical PCIe slots or lanes.

Short version is that it doesn't matter how many physical slots are mounted on the motherboard or how many lanes can be allocated in the BIOS because the processor can simultaneously address a maximum of 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes worth of bandwidth under best conditions. There are zero performance gains once PCIe 3.0 devices saturate all these lanes (in fact, there are minor performance losses since the PLX processing part adds signal latency and complicates timings, the increased signal traffic adds packet envelope overheads, and the increased signal collisions/errors require more packets get resent). So you might be able to install four GPU cards in a PLX x16/x16/x16/x16 configuration but actual performance will be comparable to (actually worse than) a non-PLX x16/x8/x8/x8 configuration. (And, besides, even mighty 980Ti and TitanX GPU cards at full load can hardly saturate >8 PCIe 3.0 lanes in practice, especially if they're directly interlinked off the PCIe bus with a CF/SLI bridge.) Just gotta wait for future Intel processors with more integrated PCIe 3.0 lane controllers."
 
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DrGreer

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What that basically tells me is PLX doesn't matter and can actually be bad (Which is a shame because the Designare board seems quite nice and is the cheapest of the lot). I've also done a bit more digging and it seems as though the main benefit to PLX is that despite what you might bog your lanes down with, you won't wind up in a situation where SLI isn't even possible anymore. There might be some other benefit I'm missing but PLX certainly doesn't actually give you more lanes that only the CPU can really provide.

So the i7-6850K is a good call. As for the motherboards, given the fact that I'll probably only ever SLI 2 of them and even if I SLI a third and it drops to x8 it's far from the end of the world, that at least leaves me to ponder the rest of the features of the boards and worry a bit less about the lane speeds. I hope I'm taking away the right ideas here and if I'm not, please correct me.

Since your answer led to some clarity I'll go ahead and mark it as such.

Thanks.
 
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helicon

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One thing to consider about RAM before you purchase anything, and this is super important....

Buy all the ram you need all at once in one ram kit. That is, if you want to max out your board to 128GB of RAM, then buy a 8X16GB kit. Do not buy two 4X16GB kits as they might not work.....that doesn't mean that buying two kits (of the same model) won't work, but from everything I've read, this is a possibility. You might already know this, but just to be safe.

Also, it looks like your choices boil down to:
MSI X99A GODLIKE GAMING CARBON
Asus Rampage V Edition 10

Whichever one of these overclocks better will give you the best chance at overclocking 128GB of memory.

I don't know if the i7-6900 or i7-6950 have "better" memory controllers, but these chips are a lower frequency than the i7-6850 and thus will likely give lower max OC RAM speeds. And that might not even matter for your particular application if you are not actually utilizing all of that memory.

I need this much memory for data analysis, where I need to load over 64GB into memory. And this is an absurd amount of memory for most other applications.




 
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DrGreer

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Thanks for that bit about the memory BTW. I plan to post one more thread dealing with the 4 x99 boards (A full analysis in the form of a question). There's a lot of give and take with various components when it comes to each board eg: Install x and y gets disabled or downgraded. What sort or algorithms are you doing data analysis with?
 
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