Product Showcase - X99 motherboard

Product Showcase 

Intel halted making their own reference motherboards. As such we had to pick one from a board partner. Now we have several boards at hand so I am showing the first one that arrived, which is the MSI X99S Gaming AC. Motherboards will be reviewed in separate articles as the performance, features and overclock behaviour can differ per board and brand. That's a nice looking motherboard right there. Rear IO connectivity -- first thing we notice, a legacy PS/2 combo port -- good stuff still preferred by hardcore gamers.

So this is the X99 motherboard used in this review, the MSI X99S Gaming AC with eight DIMM slots. That would allow you to go for 128 GB actually. The motherboard is a sheer thing of beauty. DDR4 memory is supported up-to OC speeds of 3300 MHz.

MSI has managed to insert 8x USB 3.0 at the rear IO, 1 x Gigabit LAN (KillerNIC E2205) and Wireless LAN based on Intel AC 7260 which has 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac support, optical and coaxial audio out as well as 7.1 audio which is managed by the Realtek ALC1150 codec which supports High Definition audio up-to 7.1 channels. This board supports 10 SATA3 ports, a SATA Express port and also sports an M.2. PCIe slot (32 Gbit/s).
 

A very impressive board with 40 PCI Express lanes available in combo with a Core i7 5960X or 5930K processor.