I Love X99

Everything Sucks

It's 2026 and hardware is expensive. The AI (datacenter) craze has sent prices increasingly higher, notably for memory and higher-end Nvidia GPUs. Post-COVID price normalcy was fun while it lasted. Certainly not a great time for a new build...

My Previous Build

• i9-10900K
• 3090 Ti
• 32GB of something pretty fast (~3600MHz XMP profile)

I previously had a pretty solid rig I used almost exclusively for gaming. Windows was essentially the only logical option—Nvidia was (and still kinda is) a miserable experience as the primary GPU on Linux. Nvidia had just begun releasing their open-source drivers, and a modern Wayland system was almost certainly a no-go. Nevertheless, I ran Windows 11 LTSC to avoid the bloatware shipped with consumer versions. It worked fine. Nothing notable to report.

Eventually, hardware prices began rising again just as my interest in games that actually warranted a 3090 Ti rapidly shrank. I had a pile of expensive hardware I barely touched, nor could I do actual Linux work on it. I parted my build out for a modest profit and returned to using my ThinkPad(s).

The Want

I miss having a powerful machine with a dedicated GPU. Yes, I know Thunderbolt exists. No, I don't want to restart my compositor to hotplug. A small-form-factor build would also be ideal. I'd rather not build an incredibly expensive machine simply because I don't plan to consistently game on it.

tl;dr: Fast, cheap, and tiny build, please!

Enter X99

"X99" is a bit of a misnomer. Strictly speaking, it is an Intel chipset, originally paired with Haswell-E and Broadwell-E on the enthusiast side, as well as the corresponding Haswell-EP and Broadwell-EP Xeons on workstation/server platforms. More importantly, all of these CPUs use LGA 2011-3.

In the PC-building world, though, "X99" has come to mean something considerably less specific: essentially any cheap LGA 2011-3 platform. This distinction becomes especially important once you start shopping for Chinese motherboards. The actual Intel X99 chipset was a high-end consumer/HEDT chipset released in 2014. It was never intended to be the foundation of the sort of $100-ish gaming/workstation PCs that exist today. The reason it can be one now is that the CPUs it supports have become practically worthless on the used market.

Why Care?

The price/performance ratio of "X99 chips" is fantastic. The HEDT -E chips, however, are still relatively expensive. The -EP Xeons are another story.

A Xeon E5-2697 v4 (Broadwell) can be found for under $30 on eBay. For that money, you get 18 cores and 36 threads, four memory channels, and a frankly absurd amount of PCIe connectivity. The cores are slow by modern standards, but there are a lot of them. Of course, this isn't some magical $30 CPU that beats a modern $500 processor. Single-threaded performance is firmly in the "old" category, and even highly parallel workloads eventually run into the limitations of the architecture. But for workloads that scale across many cores, these chips remain surprisingly capable.

My particular build ends up being roughly comparable to a stock 10900K in aggregate CPU performance—pretty ridiculous considering the price of the platform.

Chinese X99 Shenanigans

You can still buy a "new" LGA 2011-3 motherboard in 2026.

Specifically, a motherboard manufactured by a Chinese OEM specifically to take advantage of the enormous supply of used Xeons and server components.

Companies such as Machinist and Huananzhi have built an entire market around this. Search AliExpress or eBay for "X99 motherboard" and you'll find an entire ecosystem of boards that aren't necessarily "X99" boards.

Chipset Ambiguity

The Intel X99 chipset is the canonical consumer LGA 2011-3 chipset, but it is far from the only chipset you'll encounter on these motherboards.

The most common alternative is Intel C612. C612 is an enterprise/server-oriented chipset designed for Xeon platforms. It is consequently a rather natural match for the E5-26xx v3/v4 processors that make up the heart of the cheap-X99 ecosystem.

From a practical perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Intel produced enormous quantities of Xeon hardware for servers and workstations, and once those systems were decommissioned, there was a massive supply of inexpensive CPUs and DDR4 ECC memory. Chinese motherboard manufacturers could build inexpensive boards around these components and sell them into the DIY market.

Some boards are advertised with names like "X99 Q87", "X99 H81", or other combinations that make absolutely no sense if you're thinking about Intel's original platform segmentation. "X99" in these product listings often describes the socket/platform compatibility rather than the actual chipset. A few boards use consumer chipsets "frankensteined" into an LGA 2011-3 motherboard. The result is a motherboard that may have an LGA 2011-3 socket while technically having little relationship to the original X99 platform. Consequently, shopping for an "X99 motherboard" is less like shopping for a normal motherboard and more like shopping for a particular implementation of a CPU socket.

And quality is not consistent.

Chinese Motherboards FTW

The obvious question is: why bother?

A conventional X99 motherboard from ASUS, for example, was a high-end product when new. Meanwhile, a Chinese LGA 2011-3 board can be astonishingly cheap. Pair one with a $20–$30 Xeon and some inexpensive DDR4 ECC memory and suddenly you've got a budget workstation.

There are compromises, of course.

BIOSes can be questionable. Documentation is often nonexistent or translated poorly. Memory compatibility can be strange (as I learned). VRMs vary wildly between boards. Some boards have questionable PCIe layouts.

The Build

I wanted to maximize price-to-performance as much as possible. I settled on this:

• CPU: Xeon E5-2697 v4
• Motherboard: MACHINIST X99 K9
• Memory: Micron 16GB (4x4GB) DDR4-2133 ECC
• GPU: RX 570 (lying around)
• Case: Jonsbo C6 (White)
• PSU: Thermaltake Grand RGB 800W

All hardware, other than the motherboard, case, and cooling, was purchased used. Ultimately, the build came out to just under $300.

Deciding on a Motherboard

Objectively, this is the most important step. VRM quality is basically the sole difference between X99 boards. Due to my case size, I couldn't use any of the more widely tested full-ATX boards. Ultimately, I settled on the Machinist X99 K9 (Micro-ATX), the most expensive of the Micro-ATX Machinist boards. This board ships with a VRM fan; just to be safe, I oriented my cooler such that the heatsink (and fan) "hung" over the VRMs and provided additional airflow.

Memory Shenanigans

In the interest of sourcing the cheapest ECC DDR4 I possibly could, I originally purchased Samsung M378A5244CB0-CTD—16GB (4x4GB) DDR4-2666 ECC. My X99 K9 refused to post, throwing code b7 (or 67, I guess). Rather than try different memory, I stupidly assumed my board was broken (admittedly not entirely unlikely) and rebuilt on the worse X99 RS9 board. Upon running into the same error on that board, I painstakingly rebuilt again on the K9 and purchased Micron sticks. Sigh...

Usage and Performance

I booted an Arch Linux install (NVMe) from my ThinkPad X280. Initially, my initramfs wasn't configured to load XHCI/EHCI kernel modules, which meant my keyboard stopped working when the kernel loaded, and I couldn't enter the passkey for my LUKS-encrypted root partition. After adding

MODULES=(usbhid xhci_hcd ehci_hcd hid_generic)

to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and regenerating the initramfs, I was finally able to boot into a functional system.

I experienced no issues on 6.18.4.arch1-1. Everything worked as intended. Unfortunately, my board doesn't blink the power LED during S3 sleep, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of configuration for this in the BIOS.

I ran Geekbench 7, confirming the spectacular multi-core performance of Broadwell Xeon chips.

Wow... (marginally) faster than a (bone-stock) 10900K. Nice!

More to come in the future.