Intel DX79SI

Surprisingly, Intel's flagship X79 motherboard is the cheapest in our roundup at $280. Naturally, that ways "stuff" has been cutting, as evidenced when you count the DX79SI'south six SATA ports and four USB 3.0 ports. However, it does take some useful extras, such every bit dual Gigabit LAN, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Multi-GPU support includes 3-style SLI and CrossfireX courtesy of three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, all of which can exist populated with dual-slot cards and operate at the full x16 bandwidth.

The DX79SI has eight DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of RAM running at 1066MHz to 1866MHz with 2133 and 2400MHz possible via overclocking.

As previously mentioned, Intel has used the X79's standard SATA storage configuration of 2 SATA 6Gb/s ports and four SATA 3Gb/south ports with back up for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. There is no eSATA.

The wired Gigabit network support comes from 2 Intel controllers, the WG82579LM and WG82574L. Additionally, the board also supports Bluetooth two.1 and Wi-Fi (IEEE802.11b/g/n). The wireless module is connected to a USB 2.0 header.

Audio is covered by the Realtek ALC892 8-Aqueduct High Definition codec -- the same solution used by ECS. The DX79SI also features two FireWire ports with ane on the I/O panel and the other via header. Both are driven by a VIA VT6315N chip.

Intel includes two NEC (Renesas) PD720200 controllers for four USB 3.0 ports, two via the rear backplate and 2 via header.

The lath features a half-dozen + 2 power phase pattern, which is all Intel recommend for employ with the LGA2011 platform. Dissimilar other entries in our roundup, the DX79SI opts for a traditional BIOS sans mouse support. Although the DX79SI is fairly basic for an X79 motherboard, it doesn't disappoint in terms of layout or aesthetics.