Three-Way X99 LGA 2011-v3 ATX Motherboard Shootout

More, Less Or Just Different?

Let's say you read Intel Core i7-5960X, -5930K And -5820K CPU Review: Haswell-E Rises, and really liked the idea of Intel's latest-gen enthusiast-oriented processors. But what's the price premium on X99 motherboards (not to mention DDR4), and what does it get you? A quick look at the specs show that LGA 2011-v3-based platforms priced between $240 and $300 sport close to the same added features as a Z97-based board selling between $120 and $180.

At least from the motherboard angle, that sounds like a fairly mainstream recipe to me. But it's the technology built into Intel's newest Core i7s that make them so high-end.

You get up for 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, for example, allowing advanced graphics configurations like four-way SLI. You’d have to pay an extra $60 to get a lane-multiplying switch enabling that feature from Z97 Express, and the price premium on these boards is only twice as high. You also get ten SATA 6Gb/s ports, and the extra four ports are connected directly to the X99 PCH instead of sharing a couple of 5 Gb/s PCIe lanes, as they would on Z97. And then there are those four channels of DDR4 memory, compelling motherboard companies to build beefier circuit boards.

Perhaps the biggest cost-adding feature on X99-based desktops is all of that PCIe connectivity. You actually pay twice for it, since the controller is built into your expensive Core i7 processor. If that doesn’t make complete sense, consider that the entry-level LGA 2011-v3 processor, Intel’s $390 Core i7-5820K, has only 28 lanes rather than 40. If you want the same number of cores to connect all 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, you’re forced to buy the $590 -5930K.

Yet, the motherboard market is so competitive that price-gouging is nearly impossible. Intel consequently gets credit for adding most of the complexity and performance, and then getting to charge for it. You can’t have one without the other.  And now that we’ve acclimated ourselves to the high cost of a mainstream motherboard for Intel’s high-end socket, we’re ready to look at how motherboard manufacturers have addressed its additional interfaces.

MSI doesn’t call its X99S Gaming 7 a four-way SLI board, and there are a couple reasons for that. Still, our experience with multi-GPU graphics arrays suggests three cards is often the sweet spot for big-spending gamers. We’re not going to go too hard on MSI’s technical marketing team over the nomenclature (or the missing quad-SLI bridge), but this does leave Gigabyte’s X99-UD4 as the only four-way SLI-capable solution in our round-up.

One of the companies you might have expected to appear told us that it wanted a few more days for firmware development before seeding review sites with its most price-appropriate model. Sure enough, the other three manufacturers all sent new firmware builds a few days after we started testing. Unfortunately, catering to every firmware change starts an update loop that keeps us from completing stories, since updates are often issued in the middle of our comprehensive testing.