Road not Taken

Road not Taken is a surprisingly ambitious match-three game that casts you as a woodland ranger recently employed in a remote village. Your job is to watch over the village children when they venture into the surrounding forests, ensuring they return home safely. Your contract runs for 15 years, with every year representing a level. Over time, you form relationships with various people in the village, depending on how you interact with them and how you fare when rescuing children.

Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5

As its name suggests, this Gigabyte board is designed for keen gamers, and that means it has a keen sense of style. The PCB is mostly black, with red and white accents used on its heatsinks, and it has great-looking red LEDs along the left-hand edge and on the chipset heatsink. It will certainly stand out through a case window.

It has the grunt to support powerful graphics configurations as well. Two of its 16x PCI-E slots can run at their full speed when occupied, and it can run a further two slots if you’re happy to settle for 8x speed – ideal for quad-card setups and, unlike the MSI boards, it can accommodate four dual-slot graphics cards too. There are three 1x PCI-E slots too, which is more than any rival on test.

EVGA X99 Classified

The sleek, black X99 Classified is the second most expensive board on test , but It has plenty of features. The top-right corner has power and reset buttons, a clear-CMOS button, a triple-BIOS switcher and a two-character POST display.

The EVGA is also the only board in the Labs to provide two 8-pin CPU power connectors – comparably, the Asus Rampage V Extreme only has single 8-pin and 4-pin plugs. The EVGA is also one of only two boards on test to include two M.2 connectors, and the PCI-E slots make full use of Haswell-E’s potential 40 PCI-E lanes. This board can run two 16x PCI-E slots at their full speed, or four slots at 8x – enough power for all but the greediest of graphics configurations.

Asus Rampage V Extreme

The Rampage V Extreme is a classic ROG board: its PCB is wide, and it has the familiar black and red design. At £326, it’s also the most expensive board on test. The dramatic colours are matched with big, angular heatsinks too. The tallest is on the left and doubles as a shroud over the I/O, and there’s more metal covering the VRMs above and below the CPU socket.

That chunky, aggressive metal doesn’t impact on PC building though. There’s reasonable room around the CPU socket and the eight memory slots, and it’s easy enough to get to the 8-pin CPU power plug and the 4-pin supplementary connector. That extra connector is the first hint at this board’s enthusiast leanings too. There’s an extra Molex connector for PCI-E power, and there are power, reset and clear-CMOS buttons alongside toggles for PCI-E slots. There’s also a two-character POST display, and an M.2 slot. The latter sits between the right-hand RAM slots and the main power connector, which is unusual but sensible, freeing up more room for slots in the middle.