Best x99 mobo around $300 without tons of user complaints? (what's up with all the toasted CPUs?)

The Internal

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 14, 2004
Messages
132
Short version:

I could use suggestions on a solid x99 board that's not terribly expensive (around $300 ideally, with $400 being near the top of my price ceiling) for my i7-6850k.


Thus far, I've boiled it down to the following three motherboards (unless I discover some new one I overlooked) and would welcome any feedback to help me narrow it down:

GIGABYTE GA-X99-Phoenix SLI (rev. 1.0)
- best bluetooth implementation
- better customer reviews than most x99 broadwell-e boards
- relatively stark backplate
- trickier board colors to match for build aesthetics
- highest support RAM OC

ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming i7
- relatively ugly looking (to me)
- 2 x Ultra M.2 slots is nice
- Sound Blaster Audio a plus
- 12 phase power is cool
- mediocre Wi-Fi and most old-skool bluetooth config of the three

ASUS ROG STRIX X99 GAMING
- Matches my ROG STRIX 1070 GPU
- I like the RGB support
- disturbingly large number of "this ate my CPU" user reviews
- most expensive



The Long:

Wow... so, this has proven to be a bigger challenge than I originally anticipated.

Often, I would just buy an Asus motherboard and be done with it, but I've found a LOT of negative feedback on Newegg and Amazon when it comes to the last round of x99 boards (and ASUS boards in particular).

Though not a scientific survey, I get the impression that a lot of folks are having issues with their X99 boards toasting their CPUs.

Is there something going on with the X99 chipset? Are the 5000 and 6000 series 2011-v3 chips having a particularly high failure rate? Are more folks than usual just bitching about a user error that caused their board to die?

Features I Require:
- Ultra M.2
- Good Audio
- support for 2-way SLI and Crossfire
- support for RAID 0 and 1
- 10/100/1000 wired LAN
- USB 3.1 Type C connector
- healthy number of USB 3.0 ports
- being able to run two GPUs at full speed, 1 NVME SSD, 1 SATA SSD 6 GB/s, and a minimum of 2 hard drives in a raid 0 or 1 at the same time.

Features I really want:
- 2x Ultra M.2
- RGB lighting
- bluetooth 4.0 or newer
- color scheme that matches my existing ROG STRIX 1070 OC GPU
- lots of fan headers
- headers for LED strips
- ridiculous number of USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports
- not terribly expensive
- ATX or mATX formfactor

Nice to haves:
- Thunderbolt 3
- U.2
- Wireless AC
- NVIDIA SLI Bridge included
- onboard overclocking / error code doohickies


Feedback welcomed!
 
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You're not going to really get the full speed of the memory on the Gigabyte board. It uses multipliers beyond 3200 that gets the clock rate up but the actual bandwidth decreases which defeats the purpose. Not only that, at top memory speed, it disables two memory channels. Tech Report also had issues with the top of their X99 refresh boards, no reason to believe it also doesn't occur on their lower boards in the line.
 
I wouldn't touch a Gigabyte X99 board with a twelve or even fifteen foot pole.

On the other hand, I have an MSI X99A-Gaming-7, which I really like. It's mostly black, with some red. I think it has all the features you mention, except for the USB-C port. They probably have a newer version that does now.
 
Gigabyte X99 boards had an overwhelming amount of issues upon X99's launch and it doesn't appear that they've matured much. I had one ASRock X99 board but it died on me in two months. ASRock was responsive in the warranty process but I waited too long and can't say whether or not I would have gotten a working replacement.

My work machine uses an ASUS Sabertooth X99 board which I can't say enough good things about, but this is also my third Sabertooth product and I've had really good results so far.
 
It looks like a lot of X99 boards (especially ones geared towards overclocking) have some sort of "OC Socket" which uses the "extra" pins on the LGA 2011-v3 socket to route extra power delivery. This of course is outside of Intel's design spec, and seems to result in a lot of bricked CPUs. I know it killed my buddys 5930k on an ASUS X99 Deluxe
 
It looks like a lot of X99 boards (especially ones geared towards overclocking) have some sort of "OC Socket" which uses the "extra" pins on the LGA 2011-v3 socket to route extra power delivery. This of course is outside of Intel's design spec, and seems to result in a lot of bricked CPUs. I know it killed my buddys 5930k on an ASUS X99 Deluxe

How exactly do you know that specific feature is what killed that CPU?

I've run an ASUS X99 with my 5920k for more than 2 years now with zero issues...
 
I've had good experiences with the last Gigabyte board I bought for my i7-6700k, and it has fewer reviews of toasted CPUs, so I think I'll give them another go. Good feature set on the pheonix, and I don't plan on any aggressive overclocking for the workstation, so I feel it's a relatively safe bet.
The Asus x99 board I used on a build for my dad's 5820k has been quirky / annoying as heck. Think we'll finaly go ahead and RMA it, in fact. I really wanted to go with the Asus for the aesthetics, but between the feature set and price point, the Pheonix SLI is what I'll take a chance on this go.
Thanks for the feedback
 
Got a couple 6 core CPUs cheap from Intel (Retail Edge), so I bought an ASRock Extreme 4 X99 (original model) and ASUS Strix Gaming X99. Both ATX, and nominally in the same market segment (the ASUS is a newer design and a bit higher end). The ASRock has a 5930 and the Asus a 6850.

The ASRock had a few minor issues:
Less than ideal UEFI scrolling using either Nvidia 980 or 1080 card on 1080p display
Poor OC tools for Windows 10 (never really worked in Windows 10)
More limited fan control than ASUS in UEFI
RAM never ran at XMP speeds
Had to return my first copy, as one of the memory slots didn't work

The ASUS largely didn't have any of the issues above, and while not perfect, it's darn close. This board wanted both a 8 pin AND a 4 pin 12v aux for CPU (8 pin required) some PSUs can only support either--not both.


Do note that x99 systems are 10x more finicky than z97, z270, etc... Much higher return rate, more issues, etc... For the price all should just work, and it's just not that easy. Buy from a place with a generous return policy. Frankly I'd recommend Micro Center if an option in your area. They're pretty darn cool with returns (full disclosure--I used to work there and don't speak on their behalf), just don't try to ruin things for everyone with frivolous returns. I also recommend a good PSU, and starting with a vanilla system before any additional hardware or overclocking.
 
It's hard to know what's doing on with Amazon and Newegg reviews, especially for a brand so popular with newbs like ASUS. I'd consider it a data point, but would consider comments/reviews here more. FWIW, the biggest issue prof builders have with ASUS is 1.0 bios and speed of updates with new designs. Once that settles, the hardware is hard to knock (granted you pay for it). Do note the OC socket was an ASUS exclusive when it debuted, but other systems started adding it.

Frankly I think the higher occurrence of issues (if true) would be more due to coincidence of people who buy it wanted to overclock aggressively, perhaps with unrealistic expectations and lackluster caution (thinking a magic socket will take care of them) rather than any issue inherent in the design.
 
I've had an X99 Deluxe since launch and run it 24/7 with no issues. My 5930k is also overclocked slightly (4 GHz). The build has been rock solid stable.

I never tend to write reviews for motherboards though. I imagine people are more inclined to write one when they have a negative experience. Not to diminish the concerns, but I think majority of people probably have no issues.
 
Have that asrock board, running my 22 core xeon so definitely nothing out of spec about their socket. Registered dimms, gpu, two m2s and a 40Gbit NIC, kinda nice to have nothing but power cables running to a board.

Why are you hard up for bluetooth on a workstation board btw? Fuck wireless mice and the worst wireless audio protocol ever, I notice all bluetooth-based headsets shifting sync constantly.
 
I only want bluetooth for mouse and external speakers for music listening :p

I just like being able to do everything.

Thus far, the Gigabyte has been solid. I was doing inventory of systems I've been running... it looks like 3 of my 4 boards are gigabyte now (and one asus). Of the three older ones, I think the ASUS has been the most finicky, but I definately like the A.I. Suite software. Sure, I had to modify / hack it just a tad to make the newer A.I. Suite work with my old 3570k, but it's still held up well over the last four years with a mild overclock. :)

The only issue I discovered with my build: If / when I go SLI on the Phoenix, I'll have to dremel a tad on my NZXT S340 due to the molex for PCI-E lane extra power being 90 degrees. Dumb.

I got my 6850k hella cheap through retail edge too, Mammoth.
 
How about MSI x99a sli plus? It is one of the cheapest x99 motherboards.
 
I have the x99 Phoenix with a 6800k and haven't had any issues other than deciding to buy ram that wasn't on the compatibility list. I wasn't able to use the xmp profile. I have not attempted any overclocking yet either. Sound quality is reasonably good. I think that most of the first gen x99 had some issues, but this board seems to be at least as good as my previous x58-ud5.
 
I really want to get into a new CPU, but finding an x99 matx mobo is a pain, and according to pcpartpicker i'll need to do a bios update for the 6850k.
 
How about MSI x99a sli plus? It is one of the cheapest x99 motherboards.

I was having problems with my Gigabyte board and picked up a used one of these off ebay, in the hopes I could figure out if it was my CPU that was dead or the MB. Turns out, my CPU can clock higher on this old, cheap MSI board than it ever did on the Gigabyte Designare. Slot spacing isn't ideal for SLI since I'm also using a PCIE SSD, but sometimes price and performance aren't as tightly bound as they might seem.
 
From my own experience the last issues with Asus X99 were due to Bios versions not being fully sober.

When I got my X99 WS/IPMI RMA board I did not update any firmware at all as that killed the boards I had before.

Either the IPMI chip went dead or it killed a NIC when doing the firmware flashes.

But tbh, I left that firmware alone and the new board just does what it should, run 24/7/365 without any glitches. That is why I still prefer Asus over any other.
 
I built a system based on a MSI gaming 7 board and 5820k, then mailed it to my little brother in England. That thing has been going strong since 2014 without a single issue.

My own system runs a gigabyte Phoenix mobo and 5930K CPU. It finally works well using the latest bios. This was a replacement for my Asus tuff board that came with a dead second PCI-E slot. Only realized it was dead after a SLI test that revealed the issue.
 
X99 has been unlucky for me. Had an Asus x99 deluxe, it died after a few months, got a $500 MSI x99 XPower board, it died after a month and a half, the RMA did not boot, said f*** it and got an Asus X99A/USB 3.1 board, that's worked for about 2 years pretty good. I don't do extreme overclocking, usually just to 4.0Ghz since it's a nice round number. My old Asus x79 WS board on the other hand, worked without a hitch for years, left it in a closet for a year, someone bought it from me here for $50 because I told them I didn't know if it would work after sitting so long. They got it and said it powered right up and had no problems.
 
Replaced my X58 MSI Xpower with an X99 MSI Xpower, and if I upgrade mobo's i'ts gonna be to the MSI Godlike Carbon...

There is a theme there.

Had some issues from the old X58 after so many years, couple USB ports on the backplate went out, however this could be user error, as a friend plugged in the little "OC Dashboard" module tinggy into the firewire header. Leads were hot as hell when I pulled it
 
The problem is people buying equipment and not knowing what they're doing. And when/if they get it working, try the auto-oc feature and pump a shitload of voltage into their CPU, a lot of times with the cheapest cooler they could find. It's even worse when you're in IT like I am and work with a bunch of guys that think they know what they're doing.

My favorite comments/reviews are people that "got 3 bad motherboards in a row! never buying such-and-such again!" Sure 3 in a row defective. You'd probably win the lottery before that happened.
 
The problem is people buying equipment and not knowing what they're doing. And when/if they get it working, try the auto-oc feature and pump a shitload of voltage into their CPU, a lot of times with the cheapest cooler they could find. It's even worse when you're in IT like I am and work with a bunch of guys that think they know what they're doing.

My favorite comments/reviews are people that "got 3 bad motherboards in a row! never buying such-and-such again!" Sure 3 in a row defective. You'd probably win the lottery before that happened.
I'm curious as to what exactly you think these users are doing wrong. I'm having a hard time imagining how someone could screw up assembling a modern PC. Parts that don't work together can't even physically connect to one another most of the time.

In reality, I suspect that the core of the problems most people have with X99 setups is relatively immature BIOSes.
 
I'm curious as to what exactly you think these users are doing wrong. I'm having a hard time imagining how someone could screw up assembling a modern PC. Parts that don't work together can't even physically connect to one another most of the time.

In reality, I suspect that the core of the problems most people have with X99 setups is relatively immature BIOSes.

The most common thing is forgetting to connect the 4/8 pin power connectors.
Not seating cards or memory all the way.
Memory in random/wrong slots.
Setting the boot order wrong and not being able to see a bootable drive. It's actually easier to screw this up now with UEFI and legacy devices mixed together.
Damaging pins on the motherboard or CPU from poor handling.
Not mounting the heatsink to the motherboard correctly.
Hooking up the fans to the wrong headers on the motherboard and it goes into shutdown because it sees fan rpm as 0.
Shorting the motherboard by scraping the case standoffs against the back of the board. (in the classic case I'm thinking of, my coworker burned up the board in a spectacular jet of flame)
Plugging front panel connectors into the wrong ports on the motherboard.
Using any random PCIe slot to connect the video card.
BIOS/UEFI settings completely wrong.
Shorting the motherboard with the wrong stand-offs or screws and/or in the wrong positions.

I can probably name at least 20 more things if I think about it. I've seen a lot of stuff over the past 25 years of doing this. It used to be a lot worse. Things have gotten a lot easier to setup for the novice or first time builder. The biggest problem is that if someone does it wrong once, they'll likely keep doing it wrong with the replacement equipment as well. For instance, not connecting the 8 pin power connector or using the wrong header for the CPU fan.
 
X99 as a platform is fine but there are some considerations when building a system around it. ASUS probably does the best in my opinion but I've had great experiences with some of the GIGABYTE, MSI and even ASRock motherboards as well. X99 doesn't clock RAM for shit. I always see clocks between DDR4 2666MHz and DDR4 3000MHz at most with a few exceptions reaching 3200MHz here and there. XMP is nearly useless on X99. X99 doesn't burn up CPU's itself. The issues with burnt up or degraded CPUs only apply to Broadwell-E in my experience. I have yet to see this with Haswell-E, despite lots of first hand experience with multiple 5960X's and 5820K's. I've experienced degradation and issues with one of our test 6950X's as has Kyle. It seems Broadwell-E may be sensitive to voltages, I do not know for certain.
 
You're not going to really get the full speed of the memory on the Gigabyte board. It uses multipliers beyond 3200 that gets the clock rate up but the actual bandwidth decreases which defeats the purpose. Not only that, at top memory speed, it disables two memory channels. Tech Report also had issues with the top of their X99 refresh boards, no reason to believe it also doesn't occur on their lower boards in the line.

I know this is a late reply, but I own a Gigabyte X99 UD3P board.. and can confirm this.
 
X99 as a platform is fine but there are some considerations when building a system around it. ASUS probably does the best in my opinion but I've had great experiences with some of the GIGABYTE, MSI and even ASRock motherboards as well. X99 doesn't clock RAM for shit. I always see clocks between DDR4 2666MHz and DDR4 3000MHz at most with a few exceptions reaching 3200MHz here and there. XMP is nearly useless on X99. X99 doesn't burn up CPU's itself. The issues with burnt up or degraded CPUs only apply to Broadwell-E in my experience. I have yet to see this with Haswell-E, despite lots of first hand experience with multiple 5960X's and 5820K's. I've experienced degradation and issues with one of our test 6950X's as has Kyle. It seems Broadwell-E may be sensitive to voltages, I do not know for certain.

I would have to agree, I have tried several different types of memory in my X99 set up.. I have also looked at a lot of overclocking forums, regarding my 5820k.. most of the time the most common reference I see is the memory speed, being 2666 or 2400. There are a few out there that use 3000+ but not many... and it seems like a big pain in the ass to get the systems with high clocked memory to overclock..
 
Sorry for dragging up an old thread, but google dropped me here googling the same topic and I wanted to comment...
Do NOT go Asus! I bought the X99m WS motherboard for a 6850k. The system has been running rock solid, with no issues to speak of, with NO overclocking of any sort for a little over a year before it died spectacularily, and I will NOT buy ANY Asus product ever again after the service they provide...

Short story: Built my first ever really expensive, really higgh end PC in Jan 2017.
First thing to give was the GTX1080, it happens, Gigabyte was nice with the warranty, I got full purchase price refunded, so I played nice and bought their 1080Ti as my original model was discontinued. I have 4 years fresh warranty on the TI. Nice. This is pretty good service!

Three months later, PC left on overnight, found turned off in the morning. Power button only started cycling the machine on-off in a constant loop. After doing all the basic diagnostic stuff, found that unplugging the 8 pin CPU VRM plug allowed the PSU to stay on. So... RMA the powersupply first... (thank god I got rid of that god awful whirlwind-inducing EVGA), put in a Corsair HX750i instead. Unfortunately, same result. So... Motherboard or CPU... (it looks like both at the moment... ) So as it turns out I bought the motherboard out of country, so asus warranty services told me I have to return it to the place of purchase (I should've heeded this adivce in hindsight). It was then I noticed the sticker on the mobo box, ARS Warranty... a quick googling later I found it's an advance return service, where I get a new mobo, then send my defective one back. They also promised 24 hours delivery! Sweet!
-> Contact ASUS ARS -> RMA confirmed, new board shipped -> board arrives next day! AWESOME! -> unpack.... Yeeeah... I'm hosed...

I've been a pro PC tech for several years back in the P4/Core2 days, and we reworked a bunch of overheated laptop graphics chips, but even those homebrew reworks looked better than this. The board I received is something I would not even use as a frisbee for my dog. The CPU socket had a damaged pin right out of the box, the ATX power connector is about 6°slanted from perpendicular to the board, the bios reload switch on the backplane is very soft and has very obvious signs of soldering, the pcb itself is warped in different ways on every edge from improper reworking temperatures used, the entire pcb bottom was coated in plastic/styrofoam debris and dried up solder-paste residue. The damaged pin I only noticed after confirming that this piece of garbage indeed did not boot, as it is a very minor bend on a single pin, virtually impossible to photograph with a flash. (Fairly easy in open sunlight though.) It is also perfectly feasible that it would not stop the board from working. Nevertheless, with my CPU it only displays 00 on the diagnostic display, does not even start the motherboard-fan-headers, though it did not trip the powersupply into protect mode at least.

Immediately contacted Asus, who are in disbelief despite high-res pictures I've sent them, but they agreed to take the board back, which is pretty much the only positive thing about this ordeal... at this point I lost faith that I will have a usable board from them... even if the socket was not damaged, I would not accept the sub-par reflow work their 'service center' did. It literally looks like they just gave the board to the intern to practice on. At this point, I have to question though, I cannot believe they would send an untested board out, so if this is supposed to work, then the original board fried my CPU. That is over $1000in original purchase price up in smoke, and I can only hope Intel will warranty the chip.

Need I say that this was my first Asus product? It was also my last. My takeaway from this is to check the reviews of the company's warranty services rathern then board reviews, as everyone is raving about this board, and I have to say I was very happy with it until it died.

With this in mind... I need my damn pc up and running... is there an x99 board that at this point isn't overpriced and is worth buying?

My apologies for starting my membership with a rant but I'm really ticked by this mess at the moment... /rage off
 
People might not feel the same but I've had good luck with Asrock. Especially if you are looking for something cheap / cheapish. The Asus x99 board in my home server is on it's way out so I'm going to swap my old Asrock board back in. Also, given the time - just check the F/S thread. Lots of people are swapping out x99 for other things, so you can probably pick up something cheap.
 
Yeah I actually considered upgrading, but from what I read the X299 is not that much of a step up that it'd be worth it. I'm actually eyeing the Asrock mATX boards, but they're not that much cheaper around here (Hungary EU) that I'd actually buy one over an MSI board (though I'd need to change my case too, but I've got a bunch of usable cases laying around). As it stands, my thoughts are with MSI or EVGA. Though based on my experience with my EVGA powersupply, that is also a company I'd rather not buy anything from ever again, and I'm not a fan of the looks of the MSI board, bbut it might just end up being the one I buy. I'm also unsure if I want to risk a freshly replaced CPU (provided intel replaces it) in a used board (and given my luck with PC hardware lately, it'd blow up right in my face). It really ticks me off that considering the amount of money high end components cost, service is generally crap from most manufacturers... And to be honest, Asus' reputation as a good mobo manufacturer is so good, I did not even dream their repair facilities would be operating this shoddily... :\
If Intel refuses to RMA the chip, I might as well upgrade though I suppose... or just sell off all the overpriced crap and stick to the playstation for what little gaming I do... *sigh*
 
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