Our next set of motherboard recommendations sit at the feet of Sandy Bridge-E, the current de-facto platform for consumer throughput performance. If you have a non-GPU accelerated workload and a consumer budget, X79 offers a platform with quad channel memory as well as two 6-core processor SKUs with hyperthreading enabled. The only way to get more is to jump to Xeon processors, which can be 2-3x more expensive, or 2P/4P systems from both AMD and Intel, which offer a mix of benefits depending on how the software is programmed. X79 and Sandy Bridge-E were released in November 2011, with a cavalcade of motherboards in the first 12 months of launch. Now in 2013, new motherboard production has been slow, with only a...