Review: High-end Intel motherboard round-up

Conclusion, awards and where to buy.

We can't help but feel both frustrated and disappointed when testing high-end motherboards.

Considering the costs involved we always hope - knowing better than to expect - the boards would simply work as advertised, and provide additional performance over the mid-range offerings. Unfortunately all the tested boards fail in these regards. Few, if any, motherboards are trouble-free from day one, but uncovering compatibility and BIOS issues on a board costing £160 upwards - £230 for the 790i! - certainly grates somewhat.

With it established, the premium pricing clearly hasn't gone into quality control and bug-testing, so we move onto performance and features. In general use you see slight gains over mid-range chipsets, and our overclocking tests resulted in lower maximum FSBs than many boards using mid-range chipsets. In the end, though, it's only additional provision for multi-GPU setups that distinguish the high-end boards from the mid-range. Even if you're a proponent of multi-GPU configurations, having to pay serious money for a distinctly average motherboard purely to facilitate connecting up your hideously-expensive SLI or CrossFire setup, will leave you feeling a little short-changed.

We'd be more inclined to spend the money on a well-appointed mid-range motherboard with a good heritage and great overclocking potential, paired with a single GPU as opposed to a high-end motherboard and multi-GPU configuration, purely as it provides far greater value for money. But we're sure many of our readers would not be dissuaded from a multi-GPU setup by such trivial things as maximising value for money especially when the carrot of increased performance is dangled before them.

The sad truth is that if you want to run a multi-GPU setup you're forced to look towards the increasingly expensive high-end boards, and there are enough people willing to put up with motherboard 'peculiarities' to allow manufacturers to release uncooperative motherboards that in many cases require a good deal of work to setup and have features crippled or limited by niggling issues. Memory support on the Intel and MSI boards tested, or questionable profile support on the DFI and EVGA boards, for example.

There are a few ways to try and make a prudent choice with your high-end system, though. Going for a DDR2 as opposed to DDR3 board will allow you to save a good chunk of change on your memory with very little detriment to performance, and choosing a motherboard that allows the greatest overclocking headroom can push your CPU's performance up to, or exceed that of, more-expensive chips.

As such, of our Intel chipset-equipped boards the DFI LANPARTY LT X48-TR2 fares far better than the Intel DX48BT2. With both boards available for a similar price the Intel board can't really be justified, despite some nice features (Dolby Home Theatre and a good bundle, to name but two).

On the NVIDIA side it's less clear-cut. The nForce 780i benefits from its use of DDR2, yet the tested MSI board offers only limited overclocking potential, especially when paired with a 1,333FSB CPU. The nForce 790i Ultra, however, is massively more expensive - both for the motherboard and memory - but does offer a decent degree of overclocking.

We wouldn't outright recommend either board; the MSI due to its lack of overclocking and the EVGA due to the cost, but if you have to have that SLI setup, the EVGA is the better solution if you can swallow the cost.

The choice of a high-end LGA 775 board ultimately depends wholly on whether you wish to run CrossFire or SLI. Other than these features there is little to really distinguish the boards over mainstream offerings. If you're satisfied with a single card then a mid-range board will offer virtually the same performance and a much more attractive price-point.

If you're going to run CrossFire, the DFI works very well, assuming you can put up with the issues involved with tweaking a board with such a steep learning curve. Certainly a DDR2-equipped X48 system offers the same kind of performance as a DDR3-equipped one, so it's worth saving the extra money you'd have spent on RAM, or reinvesting it elsewhere in the system.

For SLI, the nForce 780i-based MSI P7N Diamond offers the majority of the performance of the nForce 790i-based EVGA 132 CK NF-79 for a considerably smaller outlay. It comes, however, with more of an FSB limitation so its appeal is somewhat limited to those looking to overclock for greater performance. At stock speeds, given the price, we would recommend it over the nForce 790i Ultra, yet on balance, if you've shelled out for a high-end SLI setup you are probably willing to spend a disproportionate amount of money for a small performance increase (in regards to running DDR3), and the additional overclocking headroom offered by the 790i would somewhat make up for the costs.

No board is perfect - far from it, but a case, no matter how tenuous, can be made for each. This shouldn't be how it is, because these boards are the present culmination of engineering excellence....or so we're led to believe.

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