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LGA 2011-3 platform
LGA 2011 platform
LGA 1356 platform
LGA 1366 platform (Upcoming)

LGA 2011-3 platform

If you want to get the most power for the cheapest price, it is the best choice. Used LGA2011-3 motherboards with X99 chipset from big brand like Asus, Asrock, MSI or Gigabyte are still very expensive on the second hand market like EBay, more than $130-140.
You can get some HP motherboards retired from refurbished workstation for less, like $110-$120. But beware of the compatibility. There were made for specific tested HW, and may not work with some others. And very often they don’t have standard power supply connectors, nor standard form factor, making them impossible to integrate into a standard ATX case...
So, if you want the best for the money, you can forget those options. On Aliexpress, you can get much cheaper or more powerful options.
Three motherboards retained my attention :

• Kllisre X99 or Machinist X99 : it is the cheapest one and you get it for around $60-65, shipping included !
  Just add some cheap 6 or 8 cores refurbished Xeons and some cheap refurbished ECC Memory, add any graphic card fitting you use (most powerful ones for gaming or cheapest ones if you don't intend to game) and you can get a pretty decent powerful machine for less than half the price of the latest 4 cores platforms from Intel or AMD.
  It even has a NVME M.2 port.
• Huananzhi X99-T8 Gaming : If you want a more premium looking motherboard, with more RAM slots (8 instead of 4), more SATA3 ports (8 instead of 6), 2xNVME M.2 this is the motherboard for you for less than $120
  
  
  Huananzhi X99-T8 Gaming and its embedded features.
• Need more power ? Want to take advantage of the multiprocessing capabilities of the Xeons ? For less than $170, you can get a Jingsha X99 Dual on which you can place 2 Xeons E5-2690 V3 (V4 are still too expensive) for a total of 24 cores 48 threads, along with 32 or 64MB of cheap ECC DDR4 Memory, to have an extremely powerful workstation at a very very decent price !
  
  
  The massive Jingsha X99 Dual.

X99 Chinese motherboards are the biggest bargain currently for who wants power at the best price.

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