Three-Way X99 LGA 2011-v3 ATX Motherboard Shootout

By Thomas Soderstrom
published

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?

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ASRock X99 Extreme4

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Gigabyte X99-UD4

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MSI X99S Gaming 7

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.
24 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dgingeri
    "LGA 2111-v3"??

    Did something change?
    Reply
  • west7
    In the 3D gaming page it should been i7-5760x not i7-4790 and fix the LGA 2111-v3 typo and why there in no SLI/crossfire test?!
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    12 Phases Six Phases Eight Phases what!
    Reply
  • Daniel Ladishew
    Can't wait for them to review some of the other manufacturer's products in the X99 category. The ASUS board especially.
    Reply
  • chiefpiggy
    Noob question: would my socket 1150 i5 4670k work with one of these motherboards or do I need one of the Haswell-E processors?
    Reply
  • sportfreak23
    14199415 said:
    Can't wait for them to review some of the other manufacturer's products in the X99 category. The ASUS board especially.

    +1
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    14199118 said:
    "LGA 2111-v3"??

    Did something change?
    LGA 2011 uses DDR3 while LGA2011-3 uses DDR4 so the sockets are different to prevent people from putting the wrong CPU in the wrong motherboard.

    I think there were other changes but this is the big obvious one.
    Reply
  • firefoxx04
    it should be mentioned (and maybe it was, just not on the first page) that you only get the 40 pci e lanes if you purchase the two higher tiered haswell-E chips. The lowest end model does not support 40 lanes, I think it supports 28.
    Reply
  • dgingeri
    I was commenting on the typo of "2111" vs "2011".
    Reply
  • vincevdc
    The MB grid on page one shows that the MSI X99S Gaming 7 mb has an Intel Z97 Express chipset. This is a typo...
    Reply