X299 Roundup
How do the mobos for Intel’s new CPU stack up? BENNETT RING puts four to the floor.
Last month we dug deep into the performance of Intel’s new Core-X series of CPUs, but at the time motherboards with the necessary X299 chipset were rarer than hen’s teeth. They’re still not exactly filling shelves, but we’ve managed to round up four boards that we think Core-X gamers will be interested in.
We should point out that we expected the X299 chipset-based boards to be a little more affordable than the previous X99 boards, to compete with AMD’s Ryzen compatible motherboards. We were wrong. The lowest price we could find was $499, with prices rising exponentially from there. It’s understandable that motherboard manufacturers are trying to make a buck, but when boards are often approaching the $750+ mark, it’s starting to feel a little bit like we’re being taking advantage of.
THE X299
Before we delve into the following four boards, let’s take a quick refresh of the X299 chipset. It uses the new LGA 2066 socket, which is absolutely mandatory for any Core-X CPUs, including the low- end i7-7740X, which is basically an i77700K in a new socket. It comes with a default of eight SATA 3 6Gbit/sec ports, along with quad memory channels (eight memory slots), though the speed supported by these slots varies, between 2400MHz and 2666MHz, though mobo makers are hitting speeds of 4GHz and above with ease.
It also has 30 high speed I/O lanes, which can be used as 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes, eight SATA 3 ports, and up to ten USB 3.0 ports. Depending on the chip you use, there’s a total of 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes available, but this varies depending on
the lowest price we could find was $499, with prices rising exponentially from there
the CPU installed within. The chipset also supports Intel’s new Turbo Boost Max technology 3.0, but we had major issues getting this to work reliably.
Despite uninstalling the driver on each board, and then reinstalling it on the next board, it only worked properly on two of the four boards, showing that Intel needs to put some work into ironing out any kinks with this technology. And when it did work, we didn’t see much of a speed increase, likely due to the Corsair H105 cooler we’re using, which struggles with the high TDP of an overclocked i7-7900X, the chip we used for testing. X299 obviously also supports Optane, though we’d wait a while for this caching memory to mature.
When it came time to test, we used our standard SSDs, Corsair memory, and an Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, so we could compare our results with last month’s CPU tests. This time around we focused more on gaming tests, running them at lower resolution and detail settings to limit bottlenecking elsewhere in the system. The i9-7900X doesn’t come with a cooler, so Corsair were kind enough to supply a H105 AIO cooling system with 240mm radiator. All motherboards had the latest BIOS installed, memory speeds set to 2666MHz, and Turbo Boost Max 3.0 enabled in the BIOS.
On that note, let’s see what the X299 series delivers; we’ve arranged them from cheapest to most expensive, so you can see exactly what you get for those extra dollars.