Intel DX79SI

5-Way Intel X79 Motherboard Shootout

Surprisingly, Intel's flagship X79 motherboard is the cheapest in our roundup at $280. Naturally, that means "stuff" has been cut, as evidenced when you count the DX79SI's six SATA ports and four USB 3.0 ports. However, it does have some useful extras, such as dual Gigabit LAN, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Multi-GPU support includes 3-way SLI and CrossfireX courtesy of three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, all of which can be populated with dual-slot cards and operate at the full x16 bandwidth. The DX79SI has eight DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of RAM running at 1066MHz to 1866MHz with 2133 and 2400MHz possible via overclocking. As previously mentioned, Intel has used the X79's standard SATA storage configuration of two SATA 6Gb/s ports and four SATA 3Gb/s ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. There is no eSATA. The wired Gigabit network support comes from two Intel controllers, the WG82579LM and WG82574L. Additionally, the board also supports Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi (IEEE802.11b/g/n). The wireless module is connected to a USB 2.0 header.