Intel finally acknowledges the enthusiast market with the X79 DX79SI.
Time after time Intel releases desktop boards that are seemingly targeted at the high-end market but without the features to match. Things are different with the release of the X79 DX79SI – Intel has ramped up its effort to deliver features enthusiasts are looking for.
Intel has chosen to stick with the well-known black and blue colour scheme and skull theme. Memo to Intel: we like skulls as much as the next guy but not on our motherboards. This board certainly doesn’t have the same visual appeal as the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme or Gigabyte UD7, but it’s not ugly. The heatsinks are comparable to those of other manufacturers but the heatsink to the left of the CPU is quite loose, which has some potential to damage components if knocked the wrong way.
Also a slight disappointment is the inclusion of only three PCI-E 16x slots and two SATA 6Gb/s ports, with six SATA ports in total. What might entice some users to purchase this board over other high-end offerings is the inclusion of a legacy PCI slot, which many other boards have abandoned. The IO panel is also fairly bare, sporting only two USB 3.0 ports, six USB 2.0 ports, dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet controllers and standard audio outputs.
Memory enthusiasts will be pleased to see the inclusion of eight memory slots, which can support up to 64GB of memory in an 8GB by 8GB configuration. We're very excited to see power and reset buttons included on this release as well as the BIOS entry jumper, which Intel followers have come to expect.
In our performance testing, the Intel board stacked up well against some of the bigger players. During 2D testing, the DX79SI was within 0.5% of the high-end ASUS and GIGABYTE boards. When we moved onto the 3DMark Vantage Performance and Xtreme benchmarks we found the Intel board even overtook the MSI board by 2% in both benchmarks, which is a huge advantage. The DX79SI was on par with everyone else during 3DMark 11 testing, which tells us that this board has no PCI-E bandwidth issues.
The Intel board also has some early memory clocking issues and was not able to reach 2,133MHz, which heavily impacted its bandwidth results and left it loitering in last place, but remarkably matches the super high-end ASUS Rampage IV Extreme in Crysis average frames per second.
The BIOS is extremely easy to get used to and was quite responsive without being amazing. We were able to achieve very similar frequencies on this board as we were with the higher-end offerings from other manufacturers. This board is Intel’s strongest offering yet but the RAM frequency limitations are a massive letdown. While this board hits a good price point and its problems should be resolved in the future with a BIOS update, for the time being they're a major limiting factor.
Available from Intel, retailing for $340.
APC rating: 6/10
