choosing a x299 motherboard

[haightc]

it seems like there is a lot of compromised or perhaps compromises... here is what I am looking for

1) resizable BAR support (just got ASUS RTX3070 EKWB)
2) 10th gen 48lane support, as far as I understand 10th gen is required for BAR support
3) support at least one U.2 drive
4) supports one 22110 lenght m.2, ideally a 2nd 2280 for optane
5) has atleast one active/available pcie 1x for SCSI card
6) one 8x slot for SAS raid array card
7) 2 addtional 1x PCIe slots for parallel/serial IO and firewire card....
8) not have my graphics card dropped down to 8x because for some stupid reason it has to share any bandwidth it drops down.

Eveythinything I have looked at so far has had some level of compromize....
right now I am on a rox strix x99
so since the u.2 and m.2 slot share band with I have my u.2 ssd on a add on board
my x99 would proably still give me eveything (excluding BAR even thought in theory ASUS could added it they wanted) I would want if either the PCIe 1_1 slot didn't share with the wifi or I the m.2/u.2 drive didn't share bandwidth.

It seems like the x299 series doesn't get as much love as other platforms

[G75rog]

My Rampage VI X299 7900X Apex has no use for BAR since it has 64GB RAM and a Radeon VII with 16GB. Wifi, BT, Onboard NIC is disabled.
With a Hyper X16 card I run 8 1&2 TB PCIe 3/4 NVME drives along with a mapped 34TB NAS on a 10Gb network with 1GB transfer rate doing away with the need for onboard Raid and slow SCSI/Sata/U2 drives. 4 of the onboard NVME's sport 4 different OS's to play with. Still has room for I/O cards.
I wrote drivers to use nonstandard SCSI's for my Macs and started using them with my 386. When SSD's hit the market I used protocol converters for SCSI and IDE interfaces.
Sata was left behind with the Apex converted to all NVME. Fun ride.

Waiting for the next PCIe 4 or 5 board to come along.

[haightc]

My Rampage VI X299 7900X Apex has no use for BAR since it has 64GB RAM and a Radeon VII with 16GB. Wifi, BT, Onboard NIC is disabled.
With a Hyper X16 card I run 8 1&2 TB PCIe 3/4 NVME drives along with a mapped 34TB NAS on a 10Gb network with 1GB transfer rate doing away with the need for onboard Raid and slow SCSI/Sata/U2 drives. 4 of the onboard NVME's sport 4 different OS's to play with. Still has room for I/O cards.
I wrote drivers to use nonstandard SCSI's for my Macs and started using them with my 386. When SSD's hit the market I used protocol converters for SCSI and IDE interfaces.
Sata was left behind with the Apex converted to all NVME. Fun ride.

Waiting for the next PCIe 4 or 5 board to come along.

I defiantly need to retain my legacy support my 3.84tb u.2 nvme is slightly faster than my windows boot 2tb m.2 NVME. I have linux running on a 2tb SATA SSD. I may a somepoint sun down the the SAS card and I had all my SAS SSD fail at once except for one 3.84TB drive. I did have all my games on my SAS raid array.... faster the SATA SSD array I was using but a single NVME is still fast. I can't fit my whole came library on a single 4TB SSD, I have have a 12tb and 16tb physical drives. Physical drive maybe slow but they are muhc more reliable for backup. In linux the disk overhead is so much less using SATA SSD doesn't feel as much like a performance hit. I was most thinking of using optane for it caching. I have an old fusion-io drive but didn't think it would be worth the lane usage. I could probably also loose the parallel and firewire as the USB-> parallel in theory should work well enough for my existing programmers..... USB to SCSI adapter don't work in windows and they are super slow and not super reliable.

In the future if the motherboard support bifabrication , there are m2 format adapters that a relatively cheap. u.2 drives still seem slightly cheaper, faster, cooler and more reliable than their m.2 counterparts. I do have a two-port u.2 card but my existing motherboard doesn't support it.

I do work on machine, retro stuff and play games..... it's an all-arounder. I feel like the industry forgets about industry and professionals a lot in the how me need legacy compatibility.

[restsugavan]

Running Smooth after 3 Years passed


Everything perfectly on this mother board
except this one below
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?120609-OMG-WHO-DESIGN-ROG-RAMPAGE-VI-EXTREME-CMOS-Battery-placement!

[BigJohnny]

Running Smooth after 3 Years passed


Everything perfectly on this mother board
except this one below
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?120609-OMG-WHO-DESIGN-ROG-RAMPAGE-VI-EXTREME-CMOS-Battery-placement!

Good luck with finding one of those. Ive seen a few used ones pop up here and there that are priced too high and you dont know what you are getting off of fleabay or how much of what came with it is missing.

My recommendation for the OP would be the R6EE. Just bite the bullet and get it over. Best X299 on the market. Meets all your needs with an outstanding power delivery. The original R6E is OK if you can find one but the power delivery is 8 stages vs 16 of the newer boards. The VRMs would get hot with the stock cooler. Heat Killer does have waterblocks for the VRMs on that board though. You getr get more M.2 slots with the R6EE.

[Cherry[PL]]

The worst thing about Rampage VI Extreme is VRM cooling, specially with 10+ cores CPU (HOT)
As You said, the best choice is Extreme Encore or Omega.

[PanosXidis24]

Hot???mine no goes to 58c

[BenJW]

You might also consider the ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30 for a smaller form factor. It has a pretty decent VRM solution (better than vanilla R6E, similar to R6EO) and supports 48 PCIe lanes (distributed among PCIe slots and M.2 slots). You might need some U.2 adapter though.

[haightc]

With the Rampage VI extreme the primary m.2 shares with the U.2 drive, so my 22110 m.2 would have to go in that funky DIMM slot. These sure look pretty in the promo but I feel like a lot of the flair would go unseen as it would be obstructed by the rear fan and radiator. The extreme version, like you mention I would need to I would need to go with an addon card for my u.2 drive and my main windows boot drive would need to go up into that DIMM slot and the onboard slot are max 2280.
I do have some addition m.2 drives unused at the moment, I have the old 256gb drive from when upgrade my wife's computer and yet to be use 16gb optane drive. Previous I have purchased also a 1tb and 2tb NVME for two other things but it could probably repurpose one or the other. The 1tb drive I had bought for my Atari VCS but the final release version only support SATA m.2 drives, the 2TB drive I had purchased for the polymega but I am seriously beginning to down if that thing will ever be released

[haightc]

You might also consider the ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30 for a smaller form factor. It has a pretty decent VRM solution (better than vanilla R6E, similar to R6EO) and supports 48 PCIe lanes (distributed among PCIe slots and M.2 slots). You might need some U.2 adapter though.

Looking at the prime that may work better, heat might be a thing. The 3070 generates way more heat than my previous cards when playing cyberpunk. I actually just finished the game last night and I could feel the heat coming out the the top. The GeForce auto optimize put the the game on lucrious/pysco setting.... I noticed the ray tracing a bit with the 2070 but it seemed kind no were near like results playing control.... Playing those setting seeming all the puddle reflections and stuff ingame was a little trip. The prime might be a better fit than the rampage VI extreme, the color scheme work clash a bit as eveything right now in my set up is orange and black.