So what's the deal with the TUF X299 MARK 1? Well, it features a deluge of gunmetal gray plastic armor which although gimmicky in my opinion, really looks fantastic if you?re into sweet, clean and simple motherboard aesthetics. The X299 TUF themed MARK 1 motherboard sports 3 x PCIe x16 lanes, as well as 2 x PCIe x4 slots and supports SLI/Crossfire multi-GPU configurations, as well as a dedicated PCIe M.2 port with a heatsink which is integrated into the PCH heatsink for maximum heat dissipation; this is on top of an additional hybrid SATA/PCIe port depending on how many PCI lanes your processor has.

Focusing on memory support, the X299 TUF MARK 1 has 8 DIMM slots and supports quad & dual channel memory up to speeds of 4133MHz OC, with a maximum of 128GB of total system memory supported; XMP 2.0 support is featured on this board along with all other X299 motherboards.

Storage options include 8 x SATA3 ports with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 being supported, alongside that dedicated PCIe M.2 port for the fastest NVME enabled drives on the market. This is in addition to a secondary SATA/PCIe port and it's worth mentioning that the TUF X299 MARK 1 motherboard supports Intel's new Optane Memory!