Three-Way X99 LGA 2011-v3 ATX Motherboard Shootout
Buyers of Intel's X99 platform, which supports Intel's Haswell-E and new DDR4 memory, were probably prepared to pay a premium for mid-market boards. Are any of these $240 to $300 models worthy of Intel’s latest CPUs?
Results: 3DMark, PCMark And Sandra
3DMark
Since this CPU has already been separately reviewed, today’s test looks for performance differences attributable to minor variations in memory timing and power controls unique to each motherboard. Covert overclocking would be the only reason for a major performance increase, and misconfiguration the only reason for a major decrease, so no news is good news for all three manufacturers.
Futuremark’s 3DMark shows the expected level of performance consistency.
PCMark
I had minor trouble running PCMark (this was prior to a patch addressing issues with X99-based platforms), yet the most important storage score remains consistent between all three contenders. Minor storage performance differences between this configuration and previous Z97 tests are attributable to my use of an older-model SSD, where the newer SSD is being used to test more Z97 motherboards.
Sandra
Covert overclocking and/or incidental underclocking (due to mismanaged power settings) are most easily found in Sandra’s CPU tests. Fortunately, we find no issues here.
The X99-UD4 falls noticeably behind in Sandra's Memory Bandwidth module. Some manufacturers use slower tertiary timings to allow added stability, so we’ll see how that works for Gigabyte in our overclocking tests.
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