Asus X99-E-10G WS

The epitome of workstation heaven?

- Zak Storey

WHAT DO YOU LOOK for in a motherboard? Clean style? Endurance? Good power draw? Never-ending connectivity? There’s a lot to think about when choosing the perfect motherboard. Much like a processor, you need one that’s appropriate for your build; suitable for what you want to do. In a lot of ways, it’s a contradictory component; by its very nature, it’s oxymoronic—without it, your system cannot run, but in terms of computational performance, it adds very little. Just take a look at our benchmarks, and you’ll see that the differences between these boards are slim at best. Games, in particular, do not benefit in any perceivable way, performing exactly the same on a $200 board as they would on one that costs three times as much. In fact, what we look for during testing are any significant discrepancies between them. At which point, we delve into the inner workings to figure out what exactly is going on.