Pros: If you want a motherboard that will accept 128gb Ram IF YOU DO THE BIOS UPDATE IT WILL WORK!!! Initially when I purchased it the bios version that it came with did not support it and I almost paid a 25% restock fee on my ram because I was so upset it would not turn on (READ MORE) Also if you plan on installing the operating system on the M.2 Drive then make sure you do the BIOS update!!!! When I first hooked up my board it absolutely would not boot because I had 128gig installed, so I had to purchase a cheap 4gig stick of DDR 4 just to get the bios updated. I am sure at some point these boards will ship with a current bios that will Accept 128gb but for now, If you are ordering one of these and that much ram, spend the extra $30 for some cheap ddr4 ram it could save you a bunch of frustration and time. If you are spending the money for this board then buy an M.2 Drive, they are low priced and super fast!!!! I built this system specifically to do video processing and rendering and with the combination of the M.2 drive and the processor it's a video rendering hotrod!!! what used to take 30 40 minutes now literally takes only a few minutes!!! So far I have only had mine for a month or so now and I love it!!! I run Photoshop with multiple 300dpi files open, Adobe Premier with about 400 to 500GIG of video viles loaded in the project, Adobe Audition with all the audio in the project timeline open, Adobe Aftereffects with a 3d Logo I am working on for the Video and I have a Movie playing on my one of my monitors a few web pages open and other stuff running and a short video rendering in the background and it still feels fast!!!! I am amazed at how many tasks this can handle at once and not slow down - If you want a solid machine see my specs below they WORK!!!

Cons: Just Make sure that you have a way to install the Bios Update!!!! If you want to install windows on your M.2 you will need to do the update, if you don't do the update it will get all the way to the point where you select the drive to install windows on it, it will even show the M.2 as an option to install but it will display "Windows can not install on this drive" ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS UPDATE THE BIOS!!! And it will work.. If you tried formatting the drive before the update make sure that you delete the partition when you get to that point of windows installation because if you don't delete the partition that message will continue to display!!! Do the update and you will be a happy camper.

Overall Review: Here are the specs Processor: Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell-E 8-Core Ram: G.SKILL Ripjaws 4 Series 128GB (8 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2800 (PC4 22400) M.2 Solid State Drive: SAMSUNG SM951 M.2 512GB PCI-Express 3.0 Corsair Hydro Series™ H100i GTX Extreme Performance Water/Liquid CPU Cooler. 240mm ASUS X99-E WS/USB 3.1 LGA 2011-v3 Intel X99 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 CEB Intel Motherboard Windows 10 Pro 64-bit - OEM QTY 2 OCZ RevoDrive 350 Series PCI-E 480GB PCI-Express 2.0 x8 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) RVD350-FHPX28-480G Antec TPQ-1200 1200W Continuous Power with PowerCache Technology SLI Ready CrossFire Certified 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply (I have had this powersupply for years and it worked perfectly with this board!!!) QTY 2 EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card Black 02G-P4-2968-KR (Wanted to get 4gb cards but spent all my money on the board, ram and processor but I am mostly doing video processing so I didn't really need 2 of these to do that but these are good video cards I like their performance. Matrox C680 (C680-E2GBF) 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Full Height/Half Length Full height bracket (ATX) ... _Additional video card just for the additional monitor support.. Currently with this setup I can have 6 monitors on this video card running as a display setup and 8 Monitors running on the Nvidia cards. So in total 14 monitors This is a huge investment, basically it took me 3 years to save the money for this all in all well worth the wait!!!

Pros: Worked with v4 Xeon without need to flash the BIOS (as some earlier buyers had to do). The m.2 socket works with m.2 adapter that came with retail boxed Intel 750 Series 2.5" U.2 (M.2 adaptor) 400GB SSD.

Cons: bit pricy. I wish that the recent update that includes a u.2 socket in addition to and m.2 had been available when I ordered this board in spite of it's being yet more pricy.

Overall Review: Did not need to enable hyper-kit feature in order for Intel 750 with m.2 adapter to work in the MB m.2 socket. Benchmarks on the intel 750. were not quite as good as those shown in trade press articles but close enough to give confidence that the interface is working ok. I chose this board in order to be able to use ECC memory and to have an m.2 (or u.2) interface for the system disk .

Pros: -onboard Intel NIC -overclock Xeon's -virtualization friendly. Successfully passthrough PCIe (GPU/quad NIC cards/tv tuners), TPM, USB/SATA controllers, audio, NIC's to various VM's

Cons: -expensive -M.2 runs at PCIe 2.0 x4 -after shutdown VM that has USB controller passed through; sometimes have to replug keyboard/mouse/headset

Overall Review: e5-1650 OC to 4.5Ghz ECC

Pros: This is a feature packed board and the design and physical build quality is great. Once the BIOS is updated at least, the BIOS configuration screens are rather pretty and provides lots of options to do whatever you want within a few set constraints of hardware plugged in. Once I ironed out every single issue with the BIOS, the board has been rock solid.

Cons: As it has been a year since I bought this board, I cannot comment on the current shipped BIOS state. I do know however with a freshly flashed BIOS on my board, everything now works, no extra tooling around. The one oddity I ran into is while I initially flashed with my USB 3.0 pen drive in 3.0 mode a year ago, this time around the blinking light code told me it was not working, so I inserted a USB 2.0 cable to force to 2.0 speeds and then it was happy. They warned about this in the manual, but I do find it interesting that the same drive worked a year ago in 3.0 mode, but does not work now. I was still able to copy the BIOS file to the drive in the first place under USB 3.0, so the pen drive does still seem to be fully functional.

Overall Review: When I originally bought this board over a year ago there were issues I documented here mainly specific to running a Broadwell-E V4 Xeon CPU, but seeing I have finally taken the time to revisit, ASUS fixed things, so I have updated accordingly. I have successfully switched this board over to mono-block based water cooling, though that was a challenge and it took a very long time to acquire requisite parts. The results are good at least. To really get better cooling I ended up going with high performance thermal pads and tooled around a bit to get reasonably good contact with all major heat producing components. Of course this board already has fairly decent air cooling, but you know why have the south bridge run at 50C when it can run at 27C and VRMs running cooler than the CPU is pretty cool, right? Now just to hope the water loop never springs a leak. (Fingers crossed.)

Pros: It is faster than my Rampage IV Black. The fans are quite even in turbo mode. M.2 will be exciting.

Cons: The major con is the lack of clear and ASUS non-conflicting instruction on how to update the BIOS using USB BIOS Flashback. The previous review by Guy B. was very helpful. However, what he did did not work for me. Here is what I did (I hope it's helpful too.): Downloaded from ASUS the zip folder renaming the .CAP to X99EU31.CAP. I extracted the zip file to my USB 2.0 drive pre-formatted to NTFS. FAT32 would only get me about 1.5 mins into the USB BIOS Flashback. Deleted the UPDATER.EXE from the flashdrive. Only X99EU31.CAP was on the flashdrive. Board setup for USB BIOS Flashback: I placed the board on my clean dry wooden desk only plugging in the 24-pin ATX power connector. I did not use any other connectors on the motherboard. The power supply had nothing else connected. The CPU, video card, and RAM were not installed. Per written instructions and videos, I pressed and held the USB BIOS Flashback button for about 3 seconds, and about three minutes later the blue light stopped flashing and turned off which meant the BIOS update was successful. This process was over a week of countless attempts with a FAT32 format and with the UPDATER.EXE file on the USB flashdrive. I did an RMA on one motherboard, and started an RMA on the CPU. The hint was that FAT32 is recommended but nowhere did I read it was required, and that one video mentioned only the CAP file.

Overall Review: My Rig: Broadwell E 6850K Corsair H100i v2 Asus X99E WS/USB 3.1 Corsair Dominator Platinum 8x8 GB 2800Mhz Corsair Neutron SSD 2x 480 GB Neutron in RAID 0 ASUS RAMDisk (Next month: Purchase Intel 750 Series 2.5" 1.2TB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 SSD) Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) 12 GB CaseLabs Magnum MH10

Pros: 40 PCIe lanes with the new Broadwell E CPUS > 6800! Thunderbolt header on MB. Nice Intel Gig NICs. QCode and lots of MB leds and switches to help you. Supports External eSATA drives. Has USB 3.1 (type A only). UEFI BIOS is great once you update it!

Cons: This MB is 2 years old now and seems to still ship with an OLD BIOS that does NOT support the new Broadwell E CPUs! The CPU has memory controllers and thus the MB doesn't recognize any DIMMs! First MB was DOA and I had to return it to Newegg. Not having returned a MB before and because the stupid plastic socket 'cap' has NO INSTRUCTIONS on it, I tried to fit it inside the CPU clamp and probably bent some pins! The cap goes on the OUTSIDE of the clamp! Luckily I emailed service@newegg.com and explained what I had done and they were SUPER NICE about it and assured me that my RMA would be OK. And it was! Thankyou to Rella XXX. Second MB was just fine, after I updated the BIOS to the latest version: 1. IF you have a 'new' Broadwell E CPU you MUST download the lastest BIOS from the ASUS support site here https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/X99E_WS/HelpDesk_CPU/ and then READ the MB manual ! 2. Follow the instructions on the site, unzip and rename the .cap file as instructed (X99EU31.CAP worked for me). Copy it and the updater exe to the root of a (fat32 formatted) USB drive. 3. Updating the BIOS is a little risky I am NOT LIABLE if you follow my advice here and mess it up! With power to the MB (but not turned ON), insert the USB drive with the .cap file into the USB slot on the left just above the red external eSATA port. My IO backplate outlined it in WHITE (not green). 4. The MB manual is NOT helpful here. You don't need to go into the BIOS to update it! Simply press the 'BIOS' button leftmost on the back of the MB IO ports for 3 seconds. It will start blinking in blue and continue blinking for 3-5 minutes as it updates the MB BIOS. If it just lights up and stays on you've probably forgotten to rename the bios file or something is wrong with your USB drive. Wait until the blinking stops! DO NOT interrupt the process once it starts, leave it alone, be patient. :) 5. Remove the USB drive once the 'BIOS' button goes dark and power off and then on. It should now recognize your Broadwell E CPU and your memory stick installed in D1 DIMM slot (gray)! Now you're in business and you can start adding in your PCIe or M.2 cards and changing up the BIOS settings (1 at a time!) until you are overclocking and XMP-ing to your heart's content! My Rig: Broadwell E 6850K Asus X99E WS GSkill Trident 4x8 GB 3200 CAS 16. OCX (Toshiba) 512GB NVMe RD 400 with Win10 64-bit OS ... installed in the onboard M.2 slot just fine GTX 970 ...because nobody can afford to buy a 1080 from the scalpers :(

Pros: It definitely is of high quality construction and has redundancy for power and storage covered. It's absolutely a workstation board, and I was really looking forward to having a good run with this board.

Cons: It is such a picky motherboard, it won't take known good Corsair DDR4 - 3200. It says will run 3200 on the specs and the box, but it won't pass 2800 or it will run in a boot hang loop in bios. If you don't care about that, then it has tons of everything else you're probably shopping for. XMP profiles cause instant hangs. I called ASUS and chatted ASUS and one guy put me on hold for 14 minutes after he explained that 2011-V3 doesn't support DDR past 2133 Mhz, and never returned. The chat agent would wait 4-8 minutes between replies and never provided any really useful info. She just said "our servers are down" and to return the board. She said that there is no approved DDR4-3200 for them, even though they advertise it. Although I appreciate honesty in service, I was disappointed after many years of excellent quality in ASUS. I'm seeing what others are describing, now that I've had to pick up the phone and try. I wonder who will replace them as the leader now?

Overall Review: Looks nice, clean color scheme and the 7 PCIE slots were going to be my playground, but I'm not going to wait forever to maybe or maybe not get support for what's been printed on the box and their site. I'm just hoping being a Premier customer with Newegg they'll still do the free return label because I've got $519 burning a hole in my pocket to replace this thing as soon as they get it back. I don't write many negative reviews, and if you can get past the glaring no XMP support for anything above 2800, then this might be an okay solution. I just don't accept "doesn't work as advertised" on a $500+ board.

Pros: It works great!

Cons: None

Overall Review: Unfortunately I purchased elsewhere as this was a new release and Newegg didn't have it yet. I had everything else sitting here and pulled the trigger on this as soon as I could find it - sorry Newegg, but I bought everything else here! My Creo Workstation: ASUS X99-E WS/USB3.1 XEON E5-1650v3 64Gb Crucial ECC RAM Intel 750 SSD 1.2Tb AIC AMD W5100 Graphics