Introduction

With the GTX 560 Ti 448 launch well and truly out of the way, it's time to get back into the mass of X79 boards we've got piled up around us. Today we're looking at the Intel DX79SI, a board that a lot of people may ignore. With a strong name for creating rock solid boards, though, Intel offerings continue to be quite a nice option for people who are looking for something that they want to know is backed by the company that makes the processor they're installing in it.

The DX79SI is actually the board that Intel sent with the CPU; knowing that ASUS was working so hard prior to launch on the Rampage IV Extreme, we knew that it was going to be the board to use as it would give us the best possible performance out of our 3960X.

Today, though, we step back and check out the X79 wielding DX79SI from Intel and see what it's all about. With so many motherboards on offer these days, though, is Intel a brand we want to look at, or would we prefer to go down the path of boards from companies like ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI who offer us a huge range?

The first thing we've got to do before we get into the performance of the DX79SI is check out the package that Intel has going on with the board. Once that's done we'll take a closer look at the board itself before getting into the BIOS. Once we've done that we'll cover the overclocking side of things and then see what's going on with the performance of the DX79SI.

The Package

Intel has put together quite a large box that opens up and gives us a look at some of the main features while also letting us know what the board itself looks like.

Inside we've got the I/O back plate, thermal cable, couple of SLI bridges and a mouse pad. The back also mentions the inclusion of a Bluetooth 2.1 / WiFi 802.11G module which we didn't get in our sample and we would of course expect to see the normal Driver CD / Manual in the retail versions of the board.