Today’s motherboards range from Intel’s $210 DX79TO to a $260 price shared by Asus, MSI, and ECS. Gigabyte’s X79A-UD3 might have also fit within our qualifying range, had its board not already been used for our $260 to $320 roundup. If you want to know more about the Gigabyte platform, check out Seven $260-$320 X79 Express Motherboards, Reviewed.
Because all of today’s boards exhibit similar performance, a price-per-performance chart primarily reflects price.

For $5 more than Intel's baseline, ASRock’s X79 Extreme4 adds three-way SLI, front-panel USB 3.0, rear-panel digital ports, twice as many analog audio jacks, three more SATA ports, and eSATA. While all of those features are worth several times as much as the price difference, we're left wondering how much money ASRock saved by leaving out the second set of DIMM slots.
Biostar’s TPower X79 goes a step further by integrating four more USB 3.0 ports compared to the X79 Extreme4. It still has only a single set of memory slots, however, and we’re unhappy to find its front-panel USB 3.0 header located less than one space below its third graphics slot. While most builders at this budget level don’t plan to use three graphics cards, we like to leave that option available when the slots are there. Furthermore, the TPower X79 is an extraordinarily troublesome overclocker. All of these things diminish the value of its added peripheral connectivity, compelling us to choose between ASRock and Intel.
Asus’ P9X79 splits the difference between the two most value-oriented boards by offering four rear-panel USB 3.0 ports but—strangely—no front-panel USB 3.0 headers. The board also comes up two SATA ports shy of the X79 Extreme4, and its super-valuable USB BIOS Flashback feature is so infrequently needed that it alone can’t justify its significantly-higher $260 price.
Nobody needs a win right now more than MSI, and the firm does beat its competitors with impressive efficiency. Like the TPower X79, MSI’s X79A-GD45 also has the problem of an unfortunately-placed front-panel USB 3.0 header. Anyone who knows for certain that they’ll never place a conflicting card in the bottom PCI Express slot should consider its superb efficiency as a reason to buy, though we find it hard to justify a $45 mark-up (compared to the similarly-featured X79 Extreme4) for its second set of memory slots.
ECS’ X79R-AX Deluxe faces several challenges compared to the competition, beginning with the fact that it was the only board to require a firmware update simply to support our new CPU. Anyone who orders a new processor with this board could potentially suffer the same fate. This is one of those instances where a feature similar to Asus’ USB BIOS Flashback could truly be useful, but ECS doesn’t have it. That could explain why the X79R-AX Deluxe is out-of-stock everywhere we looked.

This leads us back to a race between ASRock’s X79 Extreme4’s added features and the extra memory slots provided by Intel’s DX79TO. We could try to use the DX79TO’s higher efficiency to offset its lack of front-panel USB 3.0 support, but we prefer to have both. We were also disappointed that Intel chose to use only 32 of the CPU's 40 PCIe lanes by leaving off the third graphics slot. Add superior CPU overclocking to its superior feature set, and ASRock’s X79 Extreme4 takes the value crown.
- Can LGA 2011 Be Made More Affordable?
- ASRock X79 Extreme4
- X79 Extreme4 Firmware
- Asus P9X79
- P9X79 Firmware
- Biostar TPower X79
- TPower X79 Firmware
- ECS X79R-AX Black Deluxe
- X79R-AX Deluxe Firmware
- Intel DX79TO
- DX79TO Firmware
- MSI X79A-GD45 (8D)
- X79A-GD45 (8D) Firmware
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: StarCraft II
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Overclocking
- Which X79-Based Motherboard Offers More Value?
Since the boards all have vastly superior profit margins, your statement is misleading. Why is everyone too afraid to reveal the truth about motherboard pricing?
A comparison of the time between the power button being pressed and the installed bootloader starting would be very interesting to me. I was thinking it might be easiest to measure this by having no OS on the boot media and measuring the time to the "please insert boot media" message, but I'm sure you can think of other ways of doing it.
I'm also informed that on some boards the boot time varies dramatically dependent on whether any Overclocking is enabled, as compared to the stock settings - that would also be worth knowing.
not anymore, asrock is no longer affiliated with Asus and is owned by Pegatron Corp.
But I'm wondering why AMD continues the ATI brand on the ASrock motherboard? Seems odd. They had everyone replace the CCC as soon as they rebranded and here we are looking at the ATI logo on the ASrock board.
Also, even though there is so little difference when comparing boards using the same architecture, why no BF3 in the gaming section of the review? I thought this was one of the games mentioned in the 2012 goals for Tom's when reviewing gaming performance?
I settled on the ASRock Extreme4-m. I did have to wait for a new BIOS chip to arrive in order to make use of it though. They overnighted one to me last week and I got my system up and running over the weekend. So far so good. I've been quite happy with it now that it's working. I can't say that I've tried the overclocking features.
With the ASRock Extreme4-m the memory slots and CPU 8-pin power connectors are very close to the radiator. I went with the Intel liquid cooler for my build. It's a 120mm fan and radiator. I placed these in a Silverstone FT03 as exhaust from the top of the case. It's important to pick out RAM that doesn't have any crazy fins or spikes on it. I went with some Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 4x4GB that were on the official support list. There is a 4 to 5 mm gap between the RAM and radiator. it is plenty of room for the 8-pin wires to clear without touching the RAM or radiator. It's tight, but it works. I originally was going to buy GSkill RAM that was $20 cheaper, but there's no way the big red fins on those sticks would have fit.
I don't blame them for skipping BF3. Since the most recent video drivers I've been having all sorts of issues with BF3. It's the only game on my machine to display a "Something went wrong" error and crash the entire system. I'd imagine it's hard to benchmark such an unstable game. My Extreme4-m, i7 3820, and Radeon 7950 system has no trouble with Just Cause 2, GTA IV, Crysis, and others, but BF3 has this remarkable capability to come up with the most ridiculous of error messages and strange behavior. That game still has issues.