Three-Way X99 LGA 2011-v3 ATX Motherboard Shootout

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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: 3D Gaming And Encoding

3D Gaming

Remember the X99-UD4’s slightly lower Sandra Bandwidth scores? They’re reflected in games, albeit barely, at our least-stressful settings. Not that anyone really cares about a few averages FPS at such high performance levels.

Audio And Video Encoding

The X99S Gaming 7 falls one second behind in both iTunes and Lame, which are best known for being single-threaded and frequency-optimized. We enabled all of Intel’s energy-saving schemes; perhaps this motherboard isn’t resuming as quickly?

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.