LGA 2011-3. Quad-channel DDR4. Up to 22 Xeon cores. Six-phase VRM with MOSFET triplets. This board shouldn’t exist at this price.
We’ve been recommending Machinist boards at PCGuys for a while. We’ve built systems around them, seen them in the wild, and watched them hold up under sustained workloads. So when we call the Machinist X99 MR9 Pro our current pick for confident DIY builders, it’s coming from genuine familiarity with the platform rather than a first impression.
Here’s the full breakdown.
What It Is
The MR9 Pro uses the Intel LGA 2011-3 socket, which means it takes Xeon E5 V3 and V4 processors: workstation-grade chips with up to 22 cores that originally lived in server racks. Pair that with quad-channel DDR4 support (including cheap ECC Registered memory flooding the secondhand market as old servers get retired) and you have a seriously capable machine for a fraction of what equivalent compute would cost on a modern consumer platform.
Standard ATX form factor, 215mm x 303mm. Fits any mid or full tower. It’s a platform for builders who know what they’re doing and want the most performance per pound available.
The Chipset: What to Know Before You Buy
Community forums will flag that the MR9 Pro uses recycled consumer-grade Intel B85 or similar silicon rather than a genuine X99 or enterprise chipset. This is true and worth understanding rather than dismissing.
The Xeon E5 CPUs carry 40 PCIe lanes natively inside the processor itself. Machinist routes those lanes directly to the expansion slots, which means the chipset limitations don’t apply to the things that actually matter: graphics cards, NVMe drives, PCIe bandwidth. The chipset handles secondary functions and does that adequately.
The practical side effect is a mixed storage configuration: four SATA 3.0 ports and two SATA 2.0, rather than all SATA 3.0. For most builds this is a non-issue when fast storage runs through one of the two M.2 NVMe slots. A third M.2 slot accommodates a WiFi card if needed.
Power Delivery
This is where the MR9 Pro separates itself from cheaper boards in the same space.
The VRM uses MOSFET triplets rather than the standard doubler configuration found on entry-level X99 boards. Three MOSFETs per phase instead of two means more surface area for heat dissipation and cleaner current delivery under load. The six-phase design with an aluminium heatsink handles processors up to 140W TDP without issue.
In testing with a Xeon E5-2666 V3 at sustained full load, VRM temperatures held under 60°C with reasonable airflow. Long rendering sessions, heavy virtualisation, no throttling.
One caveat: without active airflow over the VRM area it will throttle under extreme loads. A fan positioned sensibly or a top-down CPU cooler resolves this entirely.
Memory: The Core Value Proposition
Quad-channel DDR4, four DIMM slots, up to 128GB including ECC Registered memory.
The reason this platform is compelling in 2026 is the secondhand ECC Registered DDR4 market. As enterprise servers get decommissioned, large quantities of high-capacity DDR4 ECC modules hit the market well below desktop RAM prices. Realistically, 64GB in this machine costs less than 16GB of new standard desktop DDR4.
For video editing, 3D rendering, or home lab virtualisation, that memory headroom changes what the platform is capable of entirely.
Memory speed is governed by the CPU’s integrated memory controller. V3 Xeons cap at 2133 MHz, V4 at 2400 MHz. Higher-rated modules work fine but run at the CPU’s limit.
Processor Compatibility
The MR9 Pro supports four processor families:
Xeon E5-1600/2600 V3 (Haswell-EP, 4 to 18 cores, DDR4 2133 MHz) Xeon E5-1600/2600 V4 (Broadwell-EP, 4 to 22 cores, DDR4 2400 MHz) Core i7 5000 Series (Haswell-E, 6 to 8 cores, desktop DDR4) Core i7 6000 Series (Broadwell-E, 6 to 10 cores, desktop DDR4)
Recommended pairings: the E5-2666 V3 for clock speed headroom particularly with the Turbo Boost Unlock mod, the E5-2699 V4 at 22 cores for heavily parallelised rendering or virtualisation workloads. Most builds lean Xeon purely for the value-per-core on the secondhand market.
Note: LGA 2011-3 was Intel’s high-end workstation and server socket. There are no i3, i5, Pentium, or Celeron options on this platform.
Turbo Boost Unlock
Worth flagging for builders who want to extract maximum performance.
Under normal operation, Intel’s power management tables reduce all-core clock speeds as more cores load up to stay within TDP limits. The Turbo Boost Unlock (TBU) BIOS modification bypasses this, locking all cores to their maximum single-core boost frequency. Combined with a mild undervolt (typically -50mV to -90mV to manage thermals), a 12-core V3 Xeon becomes genuinely competitive with modern mid-range desktop processors in multi-threaded workloads.
The community documentation around this is solid. Miyconst and iEngineer have done extensive work on this if you want to go digging. It requires BIOS confidence (UEFITool, flashing, patience) but is a meaningful free upgrade for builders comfortable with it.
Windows 11 Compatibility
The MR9 Pro has a TPM header (14-pin or 10-pin depending on revision) for an external TPM 2.0 module. An Infineon SLM9670 or equivalent, enabled as Discrete TPM in the BIOS, gives you full Windows 11 compliance including Secure Boot and Windows Hello. One inexpensive additional part, straightforward to source and install. A boot creator tool can also be used to bypass the TPM requirement if preferred.
Full Specifications
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Socket | Intel LGA 2011-3 |
| Form factor | ATX (215mm x 303mm) |
| Memory | 4x DDR4 DIMM, quad-channel, up to 128GB (ECC Registered supported) |
| M.2 slots | 2x NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 (up to 3,500 MB/s) + 1x WiFi |
| SATA | 4x SATA 3.0 + 2x SATA 2.0 |
| VRM | 6-phase, MOSFET triplets, aluminium heatsink, up to 140W TDP |
| Ethernet | Realtek RTL8111H Gigabit |
| Audio | Realtek ALC897, 5.1 channel |
| TPM | Header for external TPM 2.0 module |
| Max CPU TDP | 140W |
Who This Board Is For
The MR9 Pro is the right platform for three specific builder profiles.
Home lab and virtualisation: Proxmox and ESXi scale well with quad-channel memory and high core counts. This platform delivers both at a price no modern consumer board can match.
Video editing and 3D rendering: Blender and DaVinci Resolve respond well to core count. A V4 Xeon with 64GB of ECC DDR4 at this price point is not something you can replicate on a mainstream consumer platform without spending significantly more.
High-compute workstation on a budget: If you need more than a mainstream consumer platform offers but don’t want to pay workstation prices, this is the most efficient path to that compute.
It is not for first-time builders. The chipset nuances, the Turbo Boost Unlock, the TPM sourcing, the ECC memory market: these are all manageable but they require builder confidence. For someone who knows what they’re doing, this is an outstanding platform.
Buy the Machinist X99 MR9 Pro on AliExpress
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