ASUS X99-E WS vs ASUS Rampage V Extreme...

Let's say I think I'm using hardware in a different way than you, so your board should live longer Looking at the various comments, MSI X99S SLI is better than Gaming series. Less problems with BIOS and better OC results. Maybe it's just coincidence that both BIOSes died as I haven't heard about many problems with these boards.

You are right, but honestly, lately I have been eyeing the Gigabyte X99 Gaming 7 instead, and then just cover all the red parts up. I still have have 20days return left on my MSI board.

Your choice but everything can happen on any board. Personally I like dual BIOS boards with manual switch. Exception can be ROG boards where you can force flash BIOS when something happen.

I always end with ROG or something like Gigabyte SOC or ASRock OCF and in last years it was like:
X58 - Gigabyte RMA / sold -> Gigabyte RMA / dead -> ASUS R3E = no issues / collecting dust
X79 - MSI RMA / sold -> ASUS R4E = no issues / still working in my 24/7 rig
X99 - MSI RMA -> ASUS R5E = no issues so far
Z77 - MSI Sold-> Gigabyte RMA -> ASUS MVG RMA -> ASUS MVG = no issues / still working
Z87 - Gigabyte RMA x2 -> ASRock = no issues / sold
Z97 - ASRock Sold -> Gigabyte RMA -> ASUS selling right now-> Gigabyte SOC after RMA = no issues and OC better than before RMA

Woomack said:

Your choice but everything can happen on any board. Personally I like dual BIOS boards with manual switch. Exception can be ROG boards where you can force flash BIOS when something happen.

I always end with ROG or something like Gigabyte SOC or ASRock OCF and in last years it was like:
X58 - Gigabyte RMA / sold -> Gigabyte RMA / dead -> ASUS R3E = no issues / collecting dust
X79 - MSI RMA / sold -> ASUS R4E = no issues / still working in my 24/7 rig
X99 - MSI RMA -> ASUS R5E = no issues so far
Z77 - MSI Sold-> Gigabyte RMA -> ASUS MVG RMA -> ASUS MVG = no issues / still working
Z87 - Gigabyte RMA x2 -> ASRock = no issues / sold
Z97 - ASRock Sold -> Gigabyte RMA -> ASUS selling right now-> Gigabyte SOC after RMA = no issues and OC better than before RMA

Click to expand...

wth are you doing to these boards that you end up with so many RMAs? Are you overvolting the living shiznit out of everything? Like way overvolting?

Nope, for most time I'm testing memory, higher clocks etc but since X79 only one died from my fault ( was some moisture near vrm ). Except one board all others had some weaknesses.
As I remember it was something like:
- Gigabyte X58 - dead power section - twice, and one time dead BIOS
- ASUS MVG - problems with CPU socket and losing memory, support replaced the socket
- Gigabyte Z87X-OC - BIOS didn't work and it happened once on stock clocks and the other time while benching on ss/dice
- Gigabyte Z97 SOC - memory slots were faulty - every slot was working with a different max frequency like on 2 I couldn't pass DDR3-2133 clock ( no boot at all ) and the best one was stable at DDR3-3200
- MSI X79 - dead 6 out of 8 power phases ( I think so as LEDs were showing activity of each phase
- MSI X99 - second BIOS instantly died when I set 175MHz bclk at low voltages, I have no idea why 1st BIOS stopped to work 3 days before that

In this time I had some other boards like ASRock A88X Extreme6 which died after 2 hours of benching at not even so high clocks and voltages. I got new board instantly from the store and I sold it about a month ago. Except this one, all ASRock boards were working fine and I sold them. All ROG boards except M5G were working fine and I still have them ( selling M7G right now ).

I have only killed one motherboard, believe it or not, but it was an MSI. I was overclcoking a socket 775, and suddenly it all went poof, and non of the parts ever lived again.

But the fact that you dont know what killed one of the bios on the MSI scares me, as this was a similar story on Z77 Mpower, and i had sooooooo many issues overclocking my 3770k back then.

Thinking about it, I only ever had issues with MSI boards, but I will say, my first MSI board i killed, was due to watercooling. So cant fault them for that.

My Z77 MPower was working good but required higher voltage to overclock CPU at the same clock as other boards and didn't like higher memory clocks so I sold it.

While valid, these are things that he won't have to worry about either. While he may benchmark, it's for giggles and not pushing the limits.

EarthDog said:

While valid, these are things that he won't have to worry about either. While he may benchmark, it's for giggles and not pushing the limits.

Click to expand...

Exactly

Reasons for X99-E WS:
- Xeon and even new gen CPU support
- 88 lanes compared to 40 lanes
- eSATA support
- 12K capacitors
- QCode Logger POST debug
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Uhm, I am personally set for WS, although you sorted it out.
The reason is that 4th and 5th PCIe slots share bandwith with SATA Express and M.2 ports,
so only way to get both PCIe and storage performing well is to get WS with extra lanes for that.
And 5820K lacks lanes, even if you get WS it will support only 28 of them, e.g. it would be only worse.

I use heck of storage - 14 TB across 8 drives, and plan getting M.2 and SATA SSDs so these ports are very important for me, and I don't want to give them up to PCIe slots.

I am set for 5960X to get all eight cores - I also want to get as much RAM as possible e.g. 64 GB RAM.

For myself - am building a advanced server with gaming capabilities as well (using Hyper-V with RemoteFX).
And not a server board since it lacks a lot of features that X99 Deluxe/X99-E WS has to offer.
Not interested in neither Rampage (overclocking is not a priority), nor other vendors.
Also, if onboard sound does not satisfy me, I will definitely get extra audio card, X99-WS gives lanes for that.

But according to my finance, and situation in my country, purchase period is ~4 years, and I am also waiting for Xeons (that WS supports as well) and even newer gen processors to come out.

And also - only X99-E WS has eSATA ports that I use pretty much as well (for even more storage).