Intel Desktop Board DX79SI

Intel may be all about boundary-breaking processors, but it’s not exactly renowned for making exciting motherboards to go with them. But you can count on the company wanting to show off its CPUs to their best possible advantage, and this commitment is on view with the Intel Desktop Board DX79SI. With a list price of about $300, this motherboard offers a few crucial features for use with the new X79 Express chipset and a couple of additional tweaks to make it attractive to wary buyers more accustomed to fancier offerings from Asus or Gigabyte. Intel may not make too many converts this time around, and this board remains on one of the lower rungs of Intel's "Extreme" series. But if you need a solid, basic foundation for a Sandy Bridge–E CPU—and if the idea of low-risk overclocking appeals to you—this is not a bad way to go.

But, as we said, it’s also not the most scintillating option out there. Aside from the vaguely threatening skull gracing the PCH heat sink, it’s nondescript in the visual department: Its black PCB, adhering to the ATX form factor, is interrupted only occasionally by flashes of blue. You won’t see any additional color, for example, on the PCI Express (PCIe): The two PCIe x16 slots, the one PCIe x8 slot, the two PCIe x1 slots, and the one PCI slot are all black. If you’re configuring a system to use multiple video cards, either via AMD’s CrossFireX technology or Nvidia’s SLI, you can’t tell at a glance where the cards go. Also, because the two PCIe x16 cards are essentially right next to each other, there’s not a lot of room for airflow more powerful video cards might benefit from. The layout works, but it could be better. So could the motherboard's future-proofing: It supports only PCIe 2.0, not the higher-bandwidth PCIe 3.0 that many other high-end X79 Express motherboards use.

The same is true of the rear-panel ports. You only get two using extra-fast USB 3.0, but six using the older (and slower) USB 2.0 standard—definitely a letdown. Audio, of both the 7.1 analog and S/PDIF digital variety, is available on the rear panel as well, as are a FireWire port, dual Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and a handy "Back to BIOS" button that ensures you’ll always be able to boot your computer even if a previous configuration change has rendered it too unstable. Should you want still more ports, headers are available for four more USB 2.0 ports, one more USB 3.0 port, and one more FireWire port. There are, however, only six SATA ports: four of the 3Gbps standard, and two of the newer and speedier 6Gbps standard.

One thing you won’t feel like you’ll need is more memory. Intel has wisely maxed out the complement to the X79 Express quad-channel maximum: eight memory bays, four on each side of the LGA2011 socket, supporting a full 64GB of DDR3 memory overclocked to 2,400MHz. As some other motherboards we’ve looked at—which cost a lot more than this one—only have four, it was smart of Intel to go all the way here, though you may run into some difficulty installing coolers with all that memory in the way.

For those who prefer wireless connections for their computers or their handheld devices, an included Bluetooth/Wi-Fi module will provide it. Something else enthusiasts will like: the presence of power and reset buttons on the motherboard itself, with a two-digit digital readout for troubleshooting located near the bottom edge of the motherboard, as well as diagnostic LEDs that light along each step in the POST. The readout might be hard to see if you have a video card in the bottom-most PCIe x8 or PCIe x1 slots, but otherwise these are fine features of particular use to neophyte or less-experienced builders.

They have a few things even more tailored to them. The UEFI itself is not particularly scintillating—it’s all text-based, for one thing, and uses the motherboard’s same blue-and-black color scheme. But if your hardware has remained unchanged since your previous boot, Intel Fast Boot technology kicks in and performs a shortened version of the POST to save you some time. Even better is a superb automatic overclocking function in the UEFI that will get you to boosting your system’s clock speed in minutes rather than hours. Just flick a few settings, and you’re done; in our tests, we got our Core i7-3960X processor up to a stable 4.6GHz in about five minutes. Though you can still exercise more fine-tune control over your overclocking if you want, it’s hardly necessary to get outstanding results. The Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, included on the disc that comes in the box (along with Intel Express Installer for drivers and Intel Express BIOS Update), lets you implement overclocking changes in Windows if you want.

Even if you're happy with your system's standard clock speed, performance is solid on the DX79SI, with the Intel board either achieving or tying for first place on ten of our performance tests. Granted, there's seldom significant performance differences between motherboards using the same chipset, but the DX79SI nevertheless holds its own.

Power usage on the DX79SI was also among the better we’ve seen: Our full system (also equipped with an AMD Radeon HD 6990 video card) drew 99.2 watts while idle, just barely ahead of the 96.9 watts we saw with the ECS X79R-AX Deluxe, and the lowest amount of power among X79 Express motherboards at full load: 211.6 watts.

If expansive features matter more to you than power usage, then the Intel Desktop Board DX79SI is probably not the X79 Express motherboard you're looking for. Either the Editors' Choice Asus P9X79 Deluxe or the Gigabyte X79-UD7 offer a lot more additional hardware, though you'll also pay considerably more to get it (close to $400 in both cases); if you don't mind losing out on some memory access, the ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme has more decked out features, but only four memory bays. If, on the other hand, you can be satisfied with a simple, frill-free motherboard that gives you maximum RAM flexibility and some thoughtful hand-holding when it comes to overclocking, the DX79SI is a fine—if not particularly electrifying—choice.

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