Investing into the high performance Intel arena can be expensive. Alongside that $330/$580/$1050 CPU (or more for Xeons) there has to be a motherboard up to the task. X79 motherboards run from ~$200 to ~$400, with a couple of models above that, potentially doubling the price of the setup before a case/memory/storage or GPUs are considered. Today we are looking at the EVGA X79 Dark which sits near the top of this price range at $400.