Intel's high-end desktop platforms can be finicky beasts, and X299 is no exception despite its roots in Intel's enthusiast-desktop chipsets. I'm not going to name names, but the breadth and depth of CPUs one can install on this platform seems to have stretched some first-run X299 boards past their limits. I've had boards crash entirely when benchmarks like AIDA64 try to execute AVX-512 code, for example—a flagship feature of X299 and its Skylake-X CPUs. Others can't handle Intel's highest-end Skylake-X chips without a fan directly on their VRM heatsinks to prevent overheating, even when chips aren't overclocked. In short, X299 has fallen a bit short of the expectations we hold for high-end desktop platforms, especially when compared to the stability and reliability we've seen from AMD's X399 boards.