- Apr 16, 2016
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I've done a lot of research over the past couple weeks into my new build. I first very easily concluded that the price performance of the i7-6850K is something I need to take advantage of. This led me down the path of x99 motherboards and a very difficult decision. I've posted various threads regarding various components and I've finally narrowed the x99 world down to what I believe to be the best two motherboards.
Before I get into that though my use cases: Machine learning libraries (Tensorflow, Theano, Caffe, Torch, DL4J, etc.). VR game development (Which implies VR gaming). Audio and video production.
Due to my use case I decided that I need an NVIDIA Titan X Pascal with the option to expand to two of them (Not using SLI) in the future, that I should start off with at least 32GB RAM (As fast as I can get it to run) and super fast storage (m.2).
There are some pretty good deals out there from Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock but the more I delved into their boards the more I discovered a lot of give and take in regards to components and what seems to be the fact that design quality of Asus boards is unsurpassed by their competitors. My original list of boards was:
Which I have now narrowed down to:
For a while I was also considering the Asus X99-E WS/USB 3.1 but it's lacking some things like Turbo Boost 3 and U.2.
What I really like about the WS board is that it has 7 PCIe lanes supported by 1 or 2 PLX PEX chips (I don't care about the rumored tiny bit of latency involved in PLX) and that in videos I've watched where Asus employees describe their boards, they say that some components of their WS boards are built for longevity (There was also something to do with capacitors in that if I remember correctly). I don't care about the 10Gbit LAN ports. I don't plan to cart my desktop to a datacenter anytime soon. Durability and stability are very important to me. I don't know that one is better in that way than the other except by what I heard the Asus guy saying but maybe you'll all catch something I've missed.
What I like about the Rampage board is that a lot of attention is paid to it so I can expect a lot of BIOS updates and enhancements I might not see with the WS board. I do plan to do some overclocking. The audio interface also seems nice but then again I'm sure the one on the WS board isn't bad either. I also like that it has some very useful features that make overclocking easier. Is the WS board the same in that respect?
Are the differences between these boards basically what I've described so far or is there anything else that anyone can think of? What would you choose? I really wish the Rampage board had at least one more PCIe slot. Two Titan X Pascals are large. Are they going to get in the way of another slot? Can I put them side by side? Am I going to need to occupy a PCIe slot for m.2? I can envision a scenario in the near future where I'm going to have two slots taken up by 2 Titan X cards and then needing to add another card or two for video and audio production.
Thanks for answers.
Before I get into that though my use cases: Machine learning libraries (Tensorflow, Theano, Caffe, Torch, DL4J, etc.). VR game development (Which implies VR gaming). Audio and video production.
Due to my use case I decided that I need an NVIDIA Titan X Pascal with the option to expand to two of them (Not using SLI) in the future, that I should start off with at least 32GB RAM (As fast as I can get it to run) and super fast storage (m.2).
There are some pretty good deals out there from Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock but the more I delved into their boards the more I discovered a lot of give and take in regards to components and what seems to be the fact that design quality of Asus boards is unsurpassed by their competitors. My original list of boards was:
ASUS X99-E-10G WS
MSI X99A GODLIKE GAMING CARBON
Asus Rampage V Edition 10
Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX
Which I have now narrowed down to:
ASUS X99-E-10G WS (https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/X99-E-10G-WS/)
Asus Rampage V Edition 10 (https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-RAMPAGE-V-EDITION-10/)
For a while I was also considering the Asus X99-E WS/USB 3.1 but it's lacking some things like Turbo Boost 3 and U.2.
What I really like about the WS board is that it has 7 PCIe lanes supported by 1 or 2 PLX PEX chips (I don't care about the rumored tiny bit of latency involved in PLX) and that in videos I've watched where Asus employees describe their boards, they say that some components of their WS boards are built for longevity (There was also something to do with capacitors in that if I remember correctly). I don't care about the 10Gbit LAN ports. I don't plan to cart my desktop to a datacenter anytime soon. Durability and stability are very important to me. I don't know that one is better in that way than the other except by what I heard the Asus guy saying but maybe you'll all catch something I've missed.
What I like about the Rampage board is that a lot of attention is paid to it so I can expect a lot of BIOS updates and enhancements I might not see with the WS board. I do plan to do some overclocking. The audio interface also seems nice but then again I'm sure the one on the WS board isn't bad either. I also like that it has some very useful features that make overclocking easier. Is the WS board the same in that respect?
Are the differences between these boards basically what I've described so far or is there anything else that anyone can think of? What would you choose? I really wish the Rampage board had at least one more PCIe slot. Two Titan X Pascals are large. Are they going to get in the way of another slot? Can I put them side by side? Am I going to need to occupy a PCIe slot for m.2? I can envision a scenario in the near future where I'm going to have two slots taken up by 2 Titan X cards and then needing to add another card or two for video and audio production.
Thanks for answers.
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