However, Intel extremists willing to buy Haswell-E parts can probably afford it, and it has a few things that help it stand out from the rest of the crowd.

This is the company’s third X99 board with USB 3.1, but the more affordable X99-A and X99-Pro are still not available in retail. The flagship Deluxe model is – and it packs quite a punch.

The board has 8 DDR4 DIMM slots with support for quad PC25600U/DDR4-3200, five PCIe 3.0 slits, an M.2 slot and loads of connectivity options. These include more than a dozen USB 3.0 ports, a dozen SATA 6Gbps ports and two SATA Express 10Gbps ports, along with a lone Thunderbird AIC. The board also ships with 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 radios.

As for USB 3.1 support, it comes courtesy of PCIe card, which is not the most elegant option out there, but it’s practically the only way of doing it now.

While the €399 price may sound a bit steep, this is actually not the most expensive 2011-3 board out there – and it just happens to be the only E-series board with USB 3.1 support currently available in Europe. You can order it in Germany right now, shipping in a day or two.