X99 Motherboard Preview Roundup

X99 Motherboard Preview Roundup

Intel's X99 chipset, DDR4 and LGA2011-v3 socket have finally arrived as have three new very swoon-worthy CPUs. However, for many of us, it's the motherboards that bring everything together and the manufacturers have been cooking up some fantastic bits of kit for Intel's premium desktop platform.

There's been a fair amount of hype over the new X99 motherboards, possibly even more so than Z97 for the simple reason lots of tech is coming together. There's DDR4 support, Intel's first desktop 8-core CPU plus two new 6-core CPUs, M.2 and SATA Express (albeit these were also on Z97) and up to 40 PCI-E 3.0 lanes for all you multi-GPU fans out there.

As we mentioned in our Core i7-5960X review, however, up until just a few days ago, motherboard BIOSes have been decidedly flaky, with all suffering from issues with DDR4 to some extent plus a host of other issues, possibly due to Intel bringing forwards the NDA by a couple of weeks meaning things were a bit rushed.

Thankfully, as of today, these are largely solved, but it meant that our original plan of a roundup of several boards for you today wasn't possible or indeed a great idea. For one, the boards have only been stable enough the last few days. Secondly, we only received some samples less than 48 hours ago and thirdly, no one wants to see a review of motherboards with iffy BIOSes and numbers all over the place.

So, as a compromise we've put together a roundup of the boards we've received so far as well as a quick run through of their features, aesthetics and pricing and will aim to get a full review roundup next week. Where are the ASRock motherboards you ask? Sadly, we still haven't received any samples, but they are inbound and we hope to include one in our roundup next week. Till then take a look at some of the eye-candy over the next few pages or by clicking on the images below and don't forget you can read our review of the Core i7-5960X here.
























Click on the images above or here head to the first page and the Asus Rampage V Extreme