529th
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How is/does the best EVGA X99 motherboard compare in quality to the craftsmanship of the X58 Classified? I own a 760 A1 and by the looks of it the 151 HE E999 doesn't look close in comparison. Can anyone give me some feedback on the quality and craftsmanship of this 300$ board? Thanks
post edited by 529th - 2016/09/23 16:57:09
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ypsylon
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/23 23:33:39
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☄ Helpfulby 529th 2016/09/24 06:37:07
Like comparing homo-erectus and homo-sapiens. Technically same genes, but entirely different as a whole.
Looking at both X58 and X99 chipsets. If you intend to run a lot/plenty/some of legacy hardware then clearly X58 wins here. Old school, classic BIOS, without any UEFI rubbish lingering between it and the OS will play well here. For gaming performance as long as you stick with VGA heavy titles, X99 doesn't offer much at all. Yes there is some improvement, but nothing ground breaking. Newest VGAs will do fine on Gen.2 slots without coming even close to saturation point. If you play games which are CPU bound then 99 clearly out-matches 58 by a good chunk. Same goes for any tasks which require raw CPU power - video/audio/photo editing/3D rendering, VMs, databases, number crunching and such.
X58 does not offer any intel SATA3 ports for even single SSD. Yes I'm aware that most vendors offered 2 (usually Marvell) ports which were without exception utterly atrocious - on my X58 reads were ~ 400 MB/s and writes were so pathetic that sometimes HDDs in SATA2 mode were faster so I was running SSD in SATA2 mode.
X58 by now really showing it's age. Technically you can use new NVMe storage on it (without boot functionality tho), but unlike gaming, Gen.2 PCIe bandwidth is obvious bottleneck. Any NVMe drive will choke itself because of limited bandwidth. And it really shows. I was running i750 on my X58 and I was happy all the way until I had to perform large data dump. Because of limited transfers it took much longer than on X99 Classy. Chipset is simply not designed to operate with such volume of transfer. Capable of doing it, but not in the most efficient way.
As for X99 Classy overall impressions. I couldn't be more happy with it. Yes I had serious problems and snags along the way, but nothing that new firmware (or throwing more money :P) couldn't solved. It doesn't have most bells and whistles of the competitors, but it's solid like a rock of Giblartar when you get it to work. Not without reason Classy is considered as most stable X99 platform available. And level of craftsmanship is simply unmatched.
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529th
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/24 06:58:54
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Thanks for that fantastic reply! I can see you are as passionate about motherboards as I am, hah. I've been happy with my 760 A1 for the past 4-5yrs. It's a fantastic board, but I got a new perspective on it when I swapped in a different X58 board to see if I could use my unlocked multi on my W3690. It worked and the USB 3.0 is nice on the UD7 but the UD7 lacks the overclocking that the Classified offers. The Classified is a beast when it comes down to all around overclocking. No need to get more in-depth detail over it but it says a little bit about how I feel. That being said, how does the 151 HE perform in regards to overclocking?
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bdary
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/24 07:31:27
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☄ Helpfulby 529th 2016/09/24 07:51:48
I really liked my X58 Classy E770 (still in use) as well as I did my X79 Dark (still in use). I feel the same way about my X99 Classy. Good, reliable solid board and very easy to overclock. All the settings in the BIOS you need... 
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ypsylon
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/24 11:34:17
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Well glad I could be of help.
Me personally, had a bit of rocky patch with OC overall. CPU is always the only thing I OC. Never OC VGA - all titles just fly at stock clocks, 1440p, but I'm not into very VGA intensive games, definitively Mass Effect Trilogy is as intensive as it gets for me. Without shame I'm ME junkie, no two words about it.
With early BIOSes my CPU was a bit of dud. When you get black screens at 3.8 you know, chip or board is not great. As it turned out it was board fault, as with later versions of firmware I've easily reached standard 4.5, but clocked it recently to 4.4 just to be on safe side (got unexpected BSOD from background task which erased my ME2 profile while in play, I've got rudest surprise of my life when I fired up Steam/ME2 again - thankfully I've got copy... and copy of a copy of my documents).
My Crucial RAM 2666 just works. Activated XMP profile and never had any issues with it to this day. Classy as a board is not the most friendliest of things when you throw industrial grade hardware at it, but that's pretty much the only problem it has. Still full blown RAID controllers are not common issue among gamers so I won't bore you with that.
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TECH_DaveB
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/26 15:23:09
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ypsylon is correct, it does OK but not great with large RAID controllers (non-HBA, real controllers with their own CPU/RAM) same with multi port NICs, but honestly none of our boards were designed for that, they are built for enthusiast clockers and gamers.
That being said a lot of EVGA MB old timers, like myself, have a soft spot for the X58's, as they were REALLY great boards. I had one myself, I currently run a X79 Dark at home and a X99 Classy here as my test bench. The classy is a solid board. However unless you REALLY want the Creative audio, or you will be dumping enough voltage into the CPU for LN2 clocking to make the 2nd EPS connector needed, I would lean towards an FTW-K. It is a really refined board, clocks well, and the M.2 pulls from PCIE **NOT** PCH like other X99s, so if you are wanting to use an M.2 SSD the FTW-K is a better choice. Honestly, if I was building today, that would be the EVGA board I would pick. While clocking works substantially different than it did in the X58 days, I can definitely say that the current generation of X series boards match our X58s in quality.
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sethleigh
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/26 20:21:17
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Anecdotal evidence isn't very useful, but I'll just say that with my recent rebuild around the X99 FTW K everything just worked. I put it together, fired it up, and it ran. Overclocking to what I want it to run at was brain-dead simple (4.2ghz with 3.5ghz cache), it performs great, haven't had any trouble with my blu-ray drive, SSD, and 1080, the onboard sound sounds great to me (non-audiophile me), and I couldn't be more pleased with it.
Happy EVGA customer. Affiliate Code: 0Y7-1VU-ATW2 GigaByte X570 Aorus Master, AMD Ryzen 5900x under Optimus Foundation block, 32gb G.Skill DDR4 @ 3800 MHz 14-14-14-28, EVGA 3080ti FTW3 Ultra under Optimus block, 2TB 980 Pro SSD, EVGA Supernova G6 850W PS, ASUS 34" 3440x1440p 120Hz ultrawide, Lenovo 24" 1080p secondary monitor, Win 10
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Flava0ne
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/27 17:49:32
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Comming from an X58 Classified3 to the X99 Classified, my only minor issue with it in terms of the quality difference between the two is the I/O shield. The X58 I/O shield was a way better and was padded. The X99 I/O shield is just plain stamped metal.
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AngryAce
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Re: How is the best X99 motherboard
2016/09/27 21:13:34
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Flava0ne
Comming from an X58 Classified3 to the X99 Classified, my only minor issue with it in terms of the quality difference between the two is the I/O shield. The X58 I/O shield was a way better and was padded. The X99 I/O shield is just plain stamped metal.
If I am not mistaken, the I/O Shield in the FTW K is padded and it is a great motherboard. All three of the boards I received (RMA'd 2 before we realized it was something else causing my issue) and they all worked flawlessly. In addition, Klngpln used a FTW K to set the single card timespy record with an O/C of 5.2ghz http://www.evga.com/articles/01042/evga-hardware-breaks-world-records/ Its a very solid board although, I am wondering if they will have a Classified refresh with some RGB lighting and all. I have 80-days for a step-up so and I figured if they haven't announced one by then, it's not gonna happen.
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