The best motherboards for your brand new gaming PC

Intel’s high- end X99 platform under the spotlight.

You can build a gaming PC out of budget-price components and still run Far Cry 40. Or, you can spend thousands creating a PC that nails the absolute highest framerates. Your choice. But if you want the top of the current tech tree it’s got to be the latest Intel Haswell-E platform: X99.

Why would I want to spend so much building a PC?

The easy answer is future-proofing. Spend big now and you’ll be set for years. But that should still be tempered with a little restraint—you don’t need 32GB of DDR4 memory, for example, and probably won’t for another decade.

Do I need a $1200 processor?

I’d argue almost no one does. The top Core i7-5960X is a modern marvel of Intel’s technical expertise, packing in eight of the latest 22nm Haswell cores, all running at breakneck speeds and eminently overclockable. But unless you’re into serious, computationally heavy number-crunching you’re never going to see a return on your money.

Where the Haswell-E platform gets interesting is at the bottom of the range, where you find one of my favorite chips of last year and the missing link between Haswell and Haswell-E: the Core i7 5820K.

It’s priced only a little higher than the top i7 of the Z97 platform, but packs in another two cores to become the cheapest six-core CPU Intel has ever produced.

Do I have to spend a fortune on an X99 motherboard?

Again, you can if you want to. But the most pleasing thing about this platform is that you don’t have to. You can spend less on your X99 board than you might on a high-end Z97 equivalent and it will still deliver the very best PC technology currently available.

What does an X99 board offer beyond Haswell-E support?

The big thing for gamers is that this platform has the highest bandwidth for a multi-GPU setup. The standard i7/Z97 combo offers only 16 native PCIe 3.0 lanes for the whole machine, while an 5820K paired with an X99 board can offer 28. While that still won’t provide x16/x16 bandwidth on two graphics cards, it gives you more than a dual-GPU Z97 would.

The X99 also has a full x4 bandwidth M.2 socket. That’s twice the bandwidth the standard Z97 M.2 interface offers, and won’t hobble future PCIe-based SSDs.