Gigabyte X99 Designare EX Motherboard Review

Gigabyte X99 Designare-EX – X99 Chipset
Intel Core i7 5960x (3.0Ghz) Octo Core 8 x 256KB L2 Cache 20MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme
1x nVidia GTX 980Ti
4x Corsair Vengeance LPX  PC4-21300 16GB DDR4 (15-17-17-35)
HyperX 3K 240GB SSD
HP dvd1260i Multiformat 24x Writer
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SP1

MSI X99A Godlike - X99 Chipset
Intel Core i7 5960x (3.0Ghz) Octo Core 8 x 256KB L2 Cache 20MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme
1x nVidia GTX 980Ti
4x Corsair Vengeance LPX  PC4-21300 16GB DDR4 (15-17-17-35)
Micron C300 128GB SSD
HP dvd1260i Multiformat 24x Writer
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SP1

EVGA X99 FTW K – X99 Chipset
Intel Core i7 5960x (3.0Ghz) Octo Core 8 x 256KB L2 Cache 20MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme
1x nVidia GTX 980Ti
4x Corsair Vengeance LPX  PC4-21300 16GB DDR4 (15-17-17-35)
HyperX 3K 240GB SSD
HP dvd1260i Multiformat 24x Writer
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SP1

Our motherboard testing suite has been compiled to subject the system to a variety of different scenarios that help uncover some of the subtle differences in motherboard design.  Normally these differences are driven by the processor and BIOS programming but with the advent of an IMC and PCI Express moving to the CPU we have discovered that raw performance numbers are virtually identical across the systems.  

Our new approach is to look at total system performance and minimize the variances.  The results will tell us how the system responded as a total package and also give us something to use in our comparisons.