14 DAY TRIAL // Today, the hallmarks of a high-end motherboard are support for the best CPUs and support for multi-GPU configurations. A third hallmark has now been added though, namely DDR4 capability. MSI has released a mainboard that has all three.
Admittedly, gaming mainboards need to have support for the best DDR3 RAM already, as well as the ability to cope with not just CPU but memory overclocking as well.
Still, DDR4 is one level above anything that DDR3 can offer, even though it will take a while for overclockers to become as familiar and free with the technology as they are with the current tech. They should still be able to pull 3 GHz or more out of them though, especially with the lower power requirements (1.2V instead of 1.5V).
Technically speaking, DDR4 won't start replacing DDR3 until at some point in 2015, but there already are chipsets (and, thus, motherboards) that can handle it.
Case in point, MSI has readied the X99S SLI Plus Motherboard, which is, as you may or may not have deduced, powered by the X99 chipset from Intel (Wellsburg).
This is a true high-end workstation mainboard that goes one level of magnitude above what even the best consumer gaming mainboards achieve.
For one thing, the CPU socket (LGA 2011-3, gets energy via an 8 Phase PWM Design) is wired to not two or four, but eight memory slots, making for a whole lot of DDR4 RAM.
Secondly, there are forty PCI Express lanes available, which are divided among four PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots and two mini PCI Express slots.
The four big ones are important here, as it is they that allow for full-power Quad-SLI (NVIDIA) and Quad-CrossFire (AMD) graphics card arrays (four video cards, or two dual-GPU cards).
Another thing of note is the presence of 8 SATA 6.0 Gbps ports (leading to a truly massive storage capacity, especially if those new 6 TB HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital are acquired).
Other relevant traits include 14 USB 3.0 ports, one SATA Express connectors (combine PCI Express and SATA for over 1 GB/s transfers on SSDs), and 8-Pin plus the regular 24-Pin ATX power connectors.
The MSI X99S SLI Plus Motherboard is completely black and has an I/O panel packed with different interfaces, like PS/2, Gigabit LAN, 6 Channel audio, USB, etc. Everything is held together by an 8-layer PCB. Sales should begin on August 29, but the price is unknown. Other X99-based mainboards should debut around the same time, all of them ready to welcome the September-bound Intel Haswel-E CPUs.