Layout

Intel ships their DX79SI motherboard on a black PCB which black expansion slots and four blue DIMM slots. Furthermore there is quite a big southbridge cooler carrying the skull logo, you'll find on all Intel xtreme series motherboards. At the bottom edge of the board you can find several different colors which don't suite the general design.

Intel equipped the DX79SI with a 6 + 2 phase current supply regarding CPU and Memory. This is what Intel themselves suggests for a reference design regarding their socket LGA 2011. Therefore you shouldn't expect miracles from this motherboard regarding overclockability.

Totally you'll find eight DIMM-slots on the Intel DX79SI. The official clock speeds that are - if the CPUs integrated memory controller is capable: DDR3 2400 (O.C.) / 2133 (O.C.) / 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders.

Southbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The cooling blocks haven been positioned wisely, which means that they don't collide with memory or CPU cooler. Generally the design doesn't look to bad, and the skull might even be stylish, but the board lacks a theme compared to other products available.