Seven $260-$320 X79 Express Motherboards, Reviewed

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With 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity to host all of our high-bandwidth devices, LGA 2011 certainly qualifies as a premium processor interface. Today we examine seven X79-based motherboards that offer high-end features at a more palatable price.

Benchmark Results: DiRT 3

Gigabyte leads the pack at our lowest DiRT 3 settings, though Foxconn catches up at 2560x1600. Because of a small amount of variability between runs, overall placement is far more important in this test than single-result differences of less than one frame per second.

ECS jumps to the top under Ultra Quality settings and 8x anti-aliasing, but the differences are too small to call that result definitive.

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.