These five motherboards will be more at home powering a server than a high end gaming machine as they fully support Intel's Xeon E3-1200 v5 and other LGA 1151 processors, all but two offer ECC memory compatibility using Intel's C236 and C232 chipset. That doesn't mean you shouldn't consider them for your next build as they should offer rock solid stability and hey, they're camouflaged!
Up first are the X170-EXTREME ECC and X150-PRO ECC, with the first PCIe 3.0 16x slot connected directly to the CPU socket, no detours for that data. The boards support PCIe Gen.3 x4 NVMe M.2 natively and you can pick up a U.2 converter if that is what you need for your drives and Intel's USB 3.1 controller will give you performance on both the original flavour and Type-C USB ports. The X170 Extreme comes with a Killer E2400 Gigabit NIC, along with all of the benefits provided by that chip.
Up next are the X150M-PRO ECC, X150M-PLUS WS and X150-PLUS WS motherboards which are listed on Gigabyte's site. The X150M-Pro is mATX but Gigabyte still managed two PCIe 16x slots, with one limited to 4x speeds and a pair of PCI slots along with an M.2, 6 SATA 6Gbps and a SEx connector. The X150M Plus is very similar but sports a single PCIe 16x and a 4x no legacy connectors nor a SEx port. Finally the full ATX GA-X150-PLUS WS which adds a pair of PCIe x1 slots in addition to two PCIe 16x slots, with one limited to 4x speeds and a pair of PCI slots.
They’re pretty nice looking
They’re pretty nice looking boards, I think. They’d be more interesting, though, if there were graphics cards and cases that could come somewhere close to matching – or at least not clashing.
Put them in a windowless
Put them in a windowless case, problem sorted! 😀 I know I don’t bother anymore, one time trying to get every component and cable to match color was enough.
Ohh, I couldn’t do that. To
Ohh, I couldn’t do that. To me, while aesthetics may be the least “important” part of building a gaming system, they’re still an “important” part. I delayed upgrading to Z97/Haswell for weeks because I couldn’t find a motherboard that had A, the features I wanted, and B, a look that would match the rest of my build, all black and gray and silver and martial-looking. I even paid a premium for my Asus Z97-AR, which is a Z97-A but with silver trim (instead of the pale gold that Asus puked up over every non-ROG Z97 board), no VGA and DMI ports, and a 40-dollar price increase.
I like having a capable gaming system. I also like it to look cool. At least, to me.
Killer chipset, “along with
Killer chipset, “along with all of the benefits provided by that chip”…
Yeah, right… This chipset is cancer, is it that difficult to use an Intel Gigabit like any decent manufacter???
So tired of those press releases delivered as “articles” or news.
I would consider a
I would consider a workstation level board and a Xeon processor to get ECC support. I really think all memory should be ECC protected. There is very little performance penalty (due to registered/buffered modules, not really the ECC) and it isn’t much more expensive just for the memory. I would want server level components also. These boards have Killer network chips, which I don’t care for. I would want dual Intel network chips. I don’t really care about the motherboard sound either. I think I would rather just add a sound card or use digital only sound output via the video card.
No mITX board huh? I’m
No mITX board huh? I’m interested in making a tiny little Xeon build next time around and a board that isn’t quite as spartan as typical server boards would determine whether that was realistic.
Um. No Killer NIC. These
Um. No Killer NIC. These boards except the 170 are already available on Newegg.
For the 150 ECC
Onboard LAN
LAN Chipset
Intel GbE LAN chip
Max LAN Speed
10/100/1000Mbps