Last week MSI introduced its new X99A Workstation motherboard, part of the X99 refresh weve seen over the past couple of months following the launch of the Broadwell-E processor line. Despite the name workstation, this board is based on the consumer-grade Intel X99 PCH rather than the server oriented parts, and as a result it supports overclocking. Part of the Workstation feature set means that it has qualified support for NVIDIA Quadro PCIe cards, compatibility with ECC memory, and a U.2 connector for storage. The manufacturer claims that the mainboard uses special components that can improve the endurance of the board, although the warranty is still listed as three years.

Typically, workstation-class motherboards for Intel Xeon E5 v3/v4 processors in LGA2011-3 packaging are based on the Intel C612 PCH, which has the same I/O features as the desktop-class Intel X99, but also supports a number of additional capabilities, which are important for business environments, such as vPro, RSTe, SVT and so on (you can read more about Intel's 612 chipset here). When it comes to professional workstation vendors that supply machines to large corporations, those technologies make a lot of sense and are generally welcome. However, for prosumers and for many professionals working in small/medium businesses, these options might not be required, which is why a lot of motherboard manufacturers offer Intel X99-based workstation-class mainboards that fully support overclocking but continue to have numerous workstation features (such as support for ECC, when Xeon CPUs are installed). This is the focus of the X99A Workstation.