Best Motherboards

If you’re in the market for a 3-way CrossFire or SLI rig and also want three M.2 drives served at x4 mode by the CPU, competitors leave you little choice but to buy MSI’s X299 XPower Gaming AC.

Buyers who hate well-lit boards and love 10GbE will find exceptional value in the Fatal1ty X299 Professional Gaming i9 motherboard. Buyers who hate well-lit boards and don’t care about 10GbE can save $100 with ASRock’s X299 Taichi, which is based on the same PCB.

The X299 Taichi’s CPU-fed M.2 slot is likely the biggest competitive advantage of the three LGA 2066 motherboards tested thus far. Though the way its extra M.2 slot is connected precludes SLI when used with Kaby Lake-X, the X299 Taichi is cheap enough to offset the cost of a Skylake-X CPU upgrade.

Had the X299 Aorus Gaming 7 included a Thunderbolt 3 controller, it would have easily won a higher award. Were we more concerned with energy efficiency, the X299 Aorus Gaming 7 wouldn’t have won any award. The X299 Aorus Gaming 7’s upscale components are probably worth the extra money for many buyers.

Gigabyte’s X299 Aorus Gaming 3 is a solid performer and a good value for $280 or less. It does sacrifice a few features, like extra networking controllers, to reach this price point, however.

The only consumer Mini-ITX motherboard for LGA 2066 becomes our only choice for these builds. Users who are certain that they have sufficient airflow over the voltage regulator will be very pleased with its overclocking capabilities, and those less certain should add a monitoring device.