X99 motherboard recommendations requested

Currently picking out a wish list.
CPU overclocking single GPU possible 2 later M.2 x4. USB 3.1 compliant.
Water big maybe on phase.
Any ideas
Too much? Lol
Thanks in advance

I would recommend ASUS Rampage V Extreme as it's probably one of the best options for this platform but really almost every X99 motherboard is the same and the main difference make some additional features.
I don't know what about USB 3.1. ASUS has some add-on cards with 3.1 support but I don't think they will remake their top series soon.

ASRock X99 OC Formula would be my next choice but I haven't seen USB 3.1 support in description.
Gigabyte X99 SOC Force/Champion seem pretty solid too.

All above is from my point of view as I said , for 99% users there is barely any difference between X99 boards. All are high end stuff with nearly the same features.
If you look at CPU overclocking then all are the same. Differences are only in memory overclocking options but if you are not going to take part in OC rankings etc then it doesn't really matter.

What's the intended usage?

Ram overclocking yes
Any BCLK overclocking done on this platform? Possibly better Pi results from better bandwidth.
I thought I saw USB3.1 on an Asus review result on dogpile thought it was on some boards now

BTW would water benching even help the team I would think DI or cascade would be the min.

The intended use would be to have a PC again. Last time I had one I did game but I'm not positive I would do that again maybe.

Well, if you're planning on benching, nail down what cooling you want to go with before starting the build.

There's plenty you can do on water, but it all depends on how competitive you're trying to be.
But, for a gaming system, running on sub-ambient just isn't worth the risk.

Oh and posting incomplete and total misinformation on the internet in subjects I was once a fountain of useful information in at one point in time. Thanks guys for the warm welcome home. I am kidding BTW. No harsh feelings at all.

greenmaji said:

Oh and posting incomplete and total misinformation on the internet in subjects I was once a fountain of useful information in at one point in time. Thanks guys for the warm welcome home. I am kidding BTW. No harsh feelings at all.

Click to expand...

No worries, we all get rusty after taking a break

If sub ambient the solutions Woomack posted are the correct ones.

If using ambient cooling they are still good choices , but not must have

There is some X99A chip set boards on the egg but the cheaper if not only ones are MSI
They have USB 3.1 and M.2 gen3
But is MSI even a valid choice now. I remember some nightmare MSI overclocking situations with posters back when I was active.

I looked again and all of the X99A boards are MSI and that chip set is the only one that has USB 3.1 and M.2 gen3 X4 on the board not even the similar X99-A has them. My question still stands is MSI viable for overclocking?

Msi is quite viable for I overclocking Intel, absolutely!

MSI is overclocking CPU as good as any other brand. I had only some issues with higher memory clock even though I saw other users pushing DDR4 pretty high on the same board. Maybe board just didn't like the kits I was testing, hard to say. When I was testing it then were only 2-3 BIOS versions so maybe that was the issue.
MSI boards are for sure not best for harder OC. All seem great but for some reason when you push them too hard then you can expect BIOS corruption. My board went to RMA and EarthDog had similar issue with his board. I mean like MSI have 2 physical BIOS chips and both were dead. Hard to say if it's coincidence or just happens more often.

In general ASUS boards are recommended by G.Skill/Corsair for their highest clocked DDR4 kits but recently new Gigabyte boards are showing some nice OC results too. For some reason I think it's just pushing from Gigabyte marketing as some higher ranked overclockers suddenly moved from ASUS/ASRock to Gigabyte and most of them just got boards for free.
Even though I know that Gigabyte can make good results somehow I'm not convinced to them right now because of next RMA I have to make on Z97X SOC Force board. In total 2 boards from SOC/OC series = 5 RMA in one year. Even a guy who bought from me Z87X-OC Force made RMA about 2 month after he got it. In all cases dead BIOS or issues with recognizing CPU/memory.

I haven't heard about any issues with ASRock OC Formula and price isn't bad either. I would probably check it but it was unavailable in my area for longer so I got ASUS RVE and so far it's great.

On most boards you can expect 100/125/167 MHz bclk strap +3-10MHz bclk OC to each strap. It won't affect performance but helps with memory tuning. Also all boards should support memory OC at least up to ~3200. In most cases ~3000 clock is optimal for everything.

I don't think that USB 3.1 really matters as right now Win7/Win8 has often issues to keep USB 3.0 bandwidth and most devices are not even using this standard how they should. I mean that USB 3.0 supposed to run up to 600MB/s+, in real barely any board will make 400MB/s and system has often driver issues and drop to 40-90MB/s.
I hope that Win10 will bring some improvements.

If its just Windows that's the problem I wouldn't be running it anyway other than if I wanted to play a DX10+ game or bench since *inx scores don't count. But if the mobos can't maintain the bandwidth in *inx then I should not consearn myself with it.