Gigabyte Designare x299
A creator’s dream motherboard?
The X299 platform might be somewhat venerable in late 2019, but with the launch of Cascade Lake-X, motherboard companies are taking the opportunity to deck out their boards with the latest and greatest features on the market. The high-end models are all well north of $1,000 now, a price level that would have resulted in laughter and mockery just a couple of years ago. Premium X299 refresh boards might be expensive, but boy do they pack in some next generation features! Gigabyte’s X299X Designare is one such board. It probably has the best specification of any motherboard we’ve reviewed to date.
A visual inspection of the Designare reveals some interesting things. Cascade Lake-X really sucks power and this board is designed with that in mind. A 12-phase VRM capable of delivering up to 840A is mated to finned heatsinks with heatpipes. If you’re planning to overclock, you’ll need a strong power system. You get four PCIe 16x slots that run up to 2x 16x and 2x 8x, useful if you’re making use of multi-GPU grunt. You get eight SATA ports, three onboard M.2 slots and a typically excellent audio system as is often the case on Gigabyte’s top boards. Overall the design is quite subtle. It’s refreshing to see a very high end board not having to resort to ‘gaming’ style overload.
The Designare doesn’t stop there though. It’s a networking beast with Intel X550-AT2 dual 10G LAN and Wi-Fi 6. If you’re running a lot of network attached storage then you’ll love dual 10G! On the topic of storage, Gigabyte includes an expansion card to add four more m.2 drives, meaning the board can accept up to seven m.2 drives! The card is
PCIe 4.0 ready for good measure. Throw in dual Thunderbolt 3 ports with DisplayPort passthrough and it’s clear we’re looking at one of the most expandable motherboards on the market. A creative professional won’t do much better short of moving to enterprise products.
One of the only areas that seems to be lacking a bit is rear USB ports. You get a total of six, two of which are TB3/Type-C. Assuming you’re using a wired keyboard and mouse, there’s half of the type-A ports gone already. Surely a couple of extra USB 2.0 ports for basic devices wouldn’t be too difficult to add.
As is often the case when comparing the performance of motherboards, the results are similar. We used an i9-9980XE and set the minimum Turbo clock to 3.8 GHz with no AVX offset to avoid any shenanigans. X299 is now a very mature platform and one or two percent difference here or there won’t be noticed, and is typically within a margin of error.
The Gigabyte X299X Designare is a stunning motherboard, packed to the rafters with awesome levels of connectivity. If you’re invested in the Intel ecosystem, you really won’t find a board that packs a better set of features. We’re sad that boards are creeping past $1,000, but with the likes of X550 10G LAN and a 4 way PCIe 4.0 m.2 add in card, some of that extra expense is well justified.
Verdict
The Gigabyte X299X Designare is perhaps the highest spec motherboard we’ve seen to date. It’s got the lot.