X99 Motherboard Preview Roundup

EVGA X99 Classified

RRP: £290

Specifications

• Expansion slots: Five PCI-E 16x (Two x16, Two x8, One x4) , One PCI-E 4x
  
• Networking: Intel i217, Intel i210
  
• SATA Express support: NO
  
• M.2 Support: YES - Types 2230 and 2280
  
• Storage: 2 x M.2, 10 x SATA 6Gbps
  
• USB: 6 x USB 3 (2 via X99 headers), 8 x USB 2 (2 via headers)
  
• Audio: Creative Core3D Quad-Core Audio Processor (CA0132)
  
• Extras: I/O cover

The EVGA X99 Classified is an aesthetic story of two halves. The top half of the PCB looks fantastic, with the meaty LGA2011-v3 socket sitting next to an industrial-looking heatsink with a heatpipe that unusually takes a path to the right of the CPU socket down to the chipset. Everything's well laid out too, but the giant red E logo kind of spoils things in our opinion. Thankfully that's where our critisisms end as the X99 Classified is a much more substantial beast than its micro-ATX sibling.

There are four 16x PCI-E slots, supporting either x16/x16 operation or x8/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8 if three cards aren't enough for you and M.2 also makes an appearance, albeit only up to type 2280 modules. There's still no SATA Express support, but overclockers should be happy with the list of related features including voltage read points, dual 8-pin power connectors, tiple BIOS support, a PCI-E disable switch for finding faulty cards plus the usual on-board buttons and a combined CPU temperature and POST code display.




Head over the page to see the [url=6]Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4[url]