There has been a trend recently in which we see rather lacklustre improvements in Intel's CPUs and chipsets which have changed the reaction of many to new releases.  When a new chip drops enthusiasts no longer immediately switch to a diet of pot noodles so they can upgrade ASAP, instead they are more likely to have to squint to see the performance difference an upgrade would provide.

[H]ard|OCP recently took a look at the differences offered between the modern X299 chipset and the three year old X99 chipset.  The new X299 chipset offers full PCI-Express 3.0 support, 24x HSIO lanes and up to 24 PCIe lanes but the small number of systems with multiple GPUs seems to be decreasing instead of increasing so perhaps those extra lanes are merely nice to talk about but are never used.  Read through the article for a look at what the differences are, and if you feel there is a compelling reason to upgrade or if X99 is good enough to last until the next generation of Intel chipset arrives.

"New processors and another socket means a new chipset. Intel's X299 Express chipset replaces the venerable and X99 Express Chipset and updates it's HEDT platform to match it's mainstream offerings and then some. This chipset promises to be the most versatile and feature rich Intel has released to date, but is it really an improvement?"

Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:

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