If you're going down the path of building an absolute beast of a system between now and Christmas, the chances are you're going to be looking at the X79 chipset and the new LGA 2011 CPUs from Intel. At launch we've seen so many motherboards from companies that offer so many different features and hit us at so many different price points.

With such a huge list of boards available at launch, we need to take some time and see what they're all about and we've already had a look at some absolutely awesome boards. The ASUS Rampage IV Extreme is an absolute beast and offered us huge overclocking and just a massive amount of features. Along with that we also checked out the GIGABYTE G1.Assassin2 and MSI X79A-GD65.