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Six $200-$260 LGA 2011 Motherboards, Reviewed

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We know that Intel's X79 Express platform hosts the fastest desktop processors in the company's portfolio. But can it be made more affordable? We round up the least-expensive $200-$260 motherboards to determine how much you have to give up for cheap X79.

Benchmark Results: StarCraft II

ASRock and Biostar lead in StarCraft II, though those leads are within the typical performance variation between consecutive runs (around 2-3 FPS). Those leads vanish completely at 2560x1600.

41 Comments Comment from the forums
  • 27 February 2012 13:00
    I like Asrock boards. I have an 880GM-LE mATX and a Z68 Pro3 Gen3 ATX and both are good performance and price-performance wise.
    Reply
  • hellfire24 27 February 2012 13:36
    Asrock is dominating both high end and mid range market.extreme3/gen3 1155 is awesome and cheapest pci-e 3.0 sli capable mobo.Asrock FTW!!!
    Reply
  • Achoo22 27 February 2012 14:02
    Quite simply, the costs associated with Sandy Bridge-E are higher, in part because of Intel's prices and also because the boards are more difficult to design.

    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?
    Reply
  • bartholomew 27 February 2012 14:38
    ASRock has come a long way!
    Reply
  • AlexIsAlex 27 February 2012 14:43
    Would it be possible, in future motherboard reviews, to include a measure of the cold boot (POST) time? This is something that different bioses can be differentiated on, and UFEI offers the potential for very fast boots if manufacturers take advantage of it properly.

    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.
    Reply
  • americanbrian 27 February 2012 15:47
    your feature table says the asrock extreme 4 comes with an 8 phase voltage regulator, but the text of article says 10 phase...which is it ?
    Reply
  • crisan_tiberiu 27 February 2012 15:49
    ASRock = ASUS :)
    Reply
  • KT_WASP 27 February 2012 16:24
    crisan_tiberiuASRock = ASUS
    not anymore, asrock is no longer affiliated with Asus and is owned by Pegatron Corp.
    Reply
  • memadmax 27 February 2012 17:34
    I wish tom's would do a "best motherboards for the money" or something close to that.
    Reply
  • 27 February 2012 19:37
    Pegatron sounds like a merger between PegASUS + Megatron (or something like that).
    Reply