ASUS X99-WS/ USB 3.1 availability

Does anybody know if DS offers the 3.1 version of this board. I am planning on ordering a computer using the ASUS X99 WS/ USB 3.1

Thanks. I am not planning on using more than one GPU. So I'm reconsidering using the ASUS X-99 Deluxe USB 3.1

It's not problematic, just not ideal for gaming scenarios and such.

The ASUS X99-A, ASUS Rampage V Extreme, and Gigabyte GA-X99-SLI can all do x16/x16/x8 configurations (the Rampage V Extreme and GA-X99-SLI both use the 1st, 3rd, and 4th slots for this configuration). While the X99-E WS can do x16/x16/x16, two of those x16 connections are sharing a single x16 connection to the processor through a PLX PCI-e switch, giving you a total of 32 lanes of connectivity to the GPUs, as opposed the the 40 lanes on the others. If you are going to want to have a PCI-e NVMe drive in the mix, the former boards will go down to x16/x8/x8; so they'll have 32 lanes like the X99-E WS, but they still will not have the PLX switch latency and power penalties. The additional bandwidth the switches give do not affect the graphics performance much and the latency added is detrimental.

The only upside to the X99-E WS is that is supports ECC RAM, if you are going to use an Intel Xeon processor. But that is only if you are going for high up-time reliability operation.

I would go with a dual GPU set-up on Skylake for 4K and either:

a) Try a video capture software that uses Intel Quicksync on the iGPU to unload some of the major encoding work from your other hardware. You can use something like Predator in MSI Afterburner or Open Broadcast Software for this. Here is a quick video on how to set up OBS to use Quicksync.

or b) If that doesn't work, you may want to consider getting a dedicated hardware solution like: Avermedia, Hauppauge, or Elgato.