Sapphire and ECS X79 Motherboard Review

Overclockers Club has a couple X79 motherboards going head to head today. The mobo comparo features two boards, one from Sapphire and the other from ECS. Here's a quote from the article to get you started:

After looking at the lack of a heat sink over half of the VRM package I was leery of pushing too hard on the ECS X79R-AX. But push it did and offered up a higher overclock than the Sapphire Pure Black X79N by over 100MHz. The ECS BIOS allows the user to adjust the voltages in positive or negative increments instead of a fixed value for the CPU. By adjusting the vcore up and enabling LLC I was able to push the Core i7 3960X to 4653MHz using 1.46v.

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I'd rather build a machine based on a moldy piece of bread than an ECS board.

The Pure Black board has been out since around January or so. I have no clue why they are reviewing it now. Sapphire's bios support is terrible.

Two shitty motherboard makers vying for which one is less shitty. And not by much.

The X79R-AX is possibly the worst motherboard I have ever used. I bricked the BIOS by trying to change the CPU voltage, they don't know whats wrong with it and won't RMA it. The BIOS is extremely difficult to use, and if you mess up settings it has no self recovery at all, it will just keep trying to POST until you pull the battery out. The lack of heatsinks also means that long term OC's are unstable, the only overclock option that would boot for me was the self-OC setting they have built in, but it put my 3930k at 4.450ghz at 1.55v and attempting to lower it to a reasonable voltage resulted in what I have now, a 12x9 paperweight.