best x79 motherboard 220$ max

Solution
Hard to say without any other requirements.

ASUS and Gigabyte are two brands I tend to trust. X79 already puts it up into being a premium board, I don't think you can find a retail/consumer board of low quality out there. Maybe some OEM/Server designs, but even these would be pretty robust.

# of drives?
CPU?
Cooling?
Memory? # of memory sticks?
Form factor?

This appears to be the cheapest still listed on partpicker that isn't a Intel branded (Though nothing wrong with Intel), can probably shop around and find some more boards more directly.

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-p9x79le

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
Hard to say without any other requirements.

ASUS and Gigabyte are two brands I tend to trust. X79 already puts it up into being a premium board, I don't think you can find a retail/consumer board of low quality out there. Maybe some OEM/Server designs, but even these would be pretty robust.

# of drives?
CPU?
Cooling?
Memory? # of memory sticks?
Form factor?

This appears to be the cheapest still listed on partpicker that isn't a Intel branded (Though nothing wrong with Intel), can probably shop around and find some more boards more directly.

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-p9x79le

 
Solution

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
Poked around at some other e-tailers hoping to find things that just hadn't been submitted to partpicker, but doesn't look like there is much new out there.

Used market should be decent, but some of the better boards out there would probably still be out of your price range.