ASUS X99-DELUXE Motherboard Preview

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
Product Name: LGA2011-v3 Intel Desktop Motherboard
Model Number: X99-DELUXE
UPC: 8622785224 EAN: 716659852247
MSRP: $383.99 (Amazon | B&H | Newegg)

Full Disclosure: ASUS provided the product sample used in this article.

Intel’s LGA2011 and its aging X79 chipset have soldiered along for that segment of the market that prized core count and memory bandwidth above all. But now there’s a new LGA2011 in town: LGA2011-V3, complete with the new X99 chipset, and Benchmark Reviews has ASUS’ latest X99-based motherboard to test. Replete with features like 5-way optimization, Crystal Sound audio, on-board 802.11ac wireless, m.2 SSD support, extensive overclocking options, and unique additions like a fan extension card and multiple ways to mount m.2 SSDs, the ASUS X99-DELUXE is aimed squarely at the enthusiast for whom only the very best will do.

Of course, as it always is with anything that’s “the very best”, it’s going to cost you. Does the massive price increment over a high-end LGA1150 system make any sense? Let’s find out.

Unlike some of ASUS’ X79 motherboards, the X99-DELUXE is a standard ATX form factor. If you’ve seen X79 motherboards, the X99-DELUXE layout will be familiar, with a giant, twin-lever CPU socket surrounded by four DDR4 DIMM slots on either side. Unlike the “thermal armor” used on ASUS Sabertooth family of motherboards, the white plastic shrouding on the X99-DELUXE is purely cosmetic.

A huge accessories bundle includes a three-pole external 802.11ac antenna (making this the first on-board 802.11 system that supports 3-way beam-forming), a flexible tri-SLI bridge (but, strangely, no two-card SLI bridge), an I/O panel backplate, ASUS’ Q-connectors, manuals, and a gaggle of SATA cables. Last, there’s a vertical bracket for mounting m.2 SSDs in a socket just to the left of the ATX power connector. ASUS says this bracket will accommodate m.2 SSDs in form factors 2242 to 22110, which completely covers Intel’s road map.

This pre-production board did not include a driver/utility disk.

But that’s not all: ASUS also includes a PCI-E m.2 mounting card which, like the vertical m.2 mounting bracket, supports form factors 2242 to 22110. As you might expect from the “x4” appended to each m.2 mounting system, you get 4 PCI-E lanes for these devices, which should provide much higher performance than SATA.

…and a “fan extension card”. This allows you to connect up to three additional fans that can be controlled by the motherboard just the same as fans connected directly to the motherboard headers. This includes the ability to adjust the fans’ performance automatically with the Fan Xpert 3 utility. Note the two-pin connectors by each three-pin connector: these are for optional temperature probes that Fan Xpert 3 can use to control the associated fans.

The rear I/O panel comprises two gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and no fewer than 10 USB 3.0 ports. All of the rear USB 3.0 ports are courtesy of an ASMEDIA ASM1042AE controller and an ASM1074 USB 3.0 hub.

As with the X97 motherboards, the X99 gains direct support for SATA Express.

Let’s take a closer look at the some of the hardware details of this board in the next section.

The quad-channel memory system with its 8 DDR4 memory slots forces the onboard power circuitry to the side of the giant CPU socket, rather than between the socket and the rear I/O panel. The components for the 8-phase power supply can be seen peeking from under the heat sink at the right side of this image. The heat sinks are low profile and there should be plenty of room for the largest air coolers.

In front of the PCI-E slots we see ASUS’ Turbo Power Unit custom micrcontroller…

…which we also see on the back of the board. ASUS says that one of these chips is actually the EPU power-saving controller, noting that these are programmable microcontrollers and that programming is what counts, not the label on the chip. Still, it seems odd.

As you’d expect in a high-end motherboard, the audio circuitry’s pretty nice, courtesy of an ALC1150 audio codec. ASUS says the shroud over the audio circuitry incorporates metal shielding to prevent EMI interference, and that the flashy gold capacitors are “audio grade”.

Looking at the lower edge of the board, we see the front panel audio connector, a power button, a reset button, a two-digit POST code display, a clear CMOS button, and a Trusted Platform Module connector. The rectangular white connector above the clear CMOS button is a connection for the external fan controller board.

Continuing along the edge of the board we encounter two USB 3.0 connectors, two USB 2.0 connectors, and the front panel connector. The 5-pin connector just above the front panel connector is where you’d attach the cable for the optional Thunderbolt card.

Above these are switches for PCI-E lane configuration (labelled “SLI/CFX”, and more on this in a moment), an EZ XMP switch, and the EPU and TPU switches. The latter three switches offer simple control of the performance and power-usage aspects of the board: flipping the XMP switch will cause the board to apply your memory’s eXtreme Memory Profile (if it has one); the EPU switch lets the system selectively power down or underclock portions of the board to save power when they’re not being used, and the TPU I II switch applies a mild or more aggressive automatic overclock to the system. If digging around in the BIOS isn’t something you find fun, these switches make getting a little extra performance a very easy thing to do.

But let’s take a closer look at that new switch:

One benefit of LGA2011 systems is their extra PCI-E lanes: depending on which Haswell-E CPU you get, you’ll get either 40 (from the top-end 5960X) or 28 Gen 3 PCI-E lanes from the processor, either of which are improvements over the paltry 16 lanes offered by LGA1150 Haswell CPUs. The X99 chipset still offers only 8 Gen 2 PCI-E lanes, though. But keep in mind that while the previous-generation LGA2011 systems had the same number of lanes, the Haswell-E CPUs PCI-E lanes are Gen 3, with twice the bandwidth per lane.

However, you can still run out of lanes, since more and more things use them. This switch allocates lanes between the three PCI-E x16 slots and the m.2×4 SSD slot. With the switch in the 2X position as shown above, a system with two video cards gives each card the full 16 lanes, as well as reserving four lanes for m.2 SSDs. A system with three cards would need the switch in the 3X position, which would run the graphics cards at x8/x8/x8 and enable the m.2 slot; alternatively, in the BIOS, you can choose to have this switch position set the graphics card slots to x16/x16/x8 and disable the m.2 SSD slot. Given that these are all PCI-E Gen 3 lanes, though, you’re not going to loose any graphics performance at running at x8, so you might as well accept the default and keep your m.2 options open.

Let’s take a look at the latest iteration of ASUS’ UEFI BIOS in the next section.

ASUS’ new UEFI BIOS design has come to the LGA2011-V3. Like the BIOSes introduced with their Haswell X97 motherboards, there’s an “EZ Mode” screen that summarizes most system settings and offers easy ways to check your system’s fans and temperatures, change the order of boot devices, and perform simple tuning tasks.

This page shows you most of the information you’d need at a glance, divided into logical panels. First, there’s the CPU information, along with its temperature and voltage (but bear in mind that both of these values will be with the CPU idling), along with the motherboard temperature. The panel below shows the memory and SATA device information, along with the XMP setting and whether Intel Rapid Storage Technology is on or off. Below that are the speeds for 8 fans, along with a temperature/speed graph for the primary CPU fan. (I’d expect this graph to show the settings for any of the fans, but it’s fixed on the CPU fan). At the upper right is an EZ System Tuninng panel, below which is the boot priority panel. You can click and drag devices to set the boot priority.

Pressing F7 takes you to Advanced Mode, which has Main, Ai Tweaker, Advanced, Monitor, Boot, and Tool sub-pages. You could write a lengthy book on just this BIOS and all its settings, which I’m not going to do…but I will try to hit the high points. The Main page just shows you component information and lets you set the language, time, and date. You can also set a security password. One nice feature: most of the Advanced Mode pages show detailed CPU, memory, and voltage information at the far right of the page.

The AI Tweaker is where the fun stuff is. While ASUS provides a variety of simplified overclocking and tuning mechanisms, ranging from a TPU switch on the motherboard to EZ Tuning Wizard and EZ System Tuning in the BIOS, real enthusiasts who want to work at the “bare metal” level will find everything here they need to adjust CPU and memory parameters to get the best possible performance. Most item have explanatory text shown at the bottom of the screen for the currently selected setting, which is a big help, although some of the more obscure settings are still rather…obscure. Then again, how can you summarize the t_RDRDr setting under memory timing?

The Advanced section is where all the non-performance adjustments live. This includes CPU features like Intel Virtualization Technology and Hyper-threading, and USB and SATA configuration, and so on.

I admit I’ve always found the idea of a Monitor section in the BIOS a little odd, given that your system will always be running at idle when you’re on this screen. Still, there it is.

There’s more BIOS goodness in the next section.

The Tool section includes the EZ Flash utility, which can read a new BIOS file from any storage device– including USB sticks– attached to the system.

This is also where you can store your overclocking profiles. If you think you’ve got a really good one, you can save it to a removable storage device and send it to anyone who has this motherboard. You’re limited, however, in the number of characters you can use to label the profiles.

As with the Z97 boards, ASUS has changed the behavior of the My Favorites feature, which provides quick links to any setting in the BIOS. Previously, pressing a function key while you were in the setting you wanted to save was all you had to do. Now, you must go to Advanced mode, press F3, and then navigate this “tree map” to assign the settings you want to the My Favorites page. I liked the old way better.

A new feature in the X99-DELUXE BIOS is the oddly-named GPU Post screen. This shows each GPU in your system and how many PCI-E lanes it’s using. This is the kind of welcome innovation I’ve come to expect from ASUS.

When you press F10 to save changes, you’ll see a very handy list of all the settings you’ve changed in this session, so you’ll know exactly what’s going to happen when you click “OK”. This remains one of my very favorite BIOS features.

In the next section I’ll summarize my preliminary impressions of this motherboard.

Benchmark Reviews will be providing a performance and bundled software review of this motherboard in the near future. Based on my limited time with this motherboard, though, I do have some thoughts.

• I fully expect this system, equipped with 16GB of Corsair DDR4 memory and Intel’s top Core i7-5960X CPU, to be the fastest system I’ve ever tested…at least on benchmarks that use more than four cores. If you’re doing work that can benefit from all those cores, this is great, because the only way to get an 8-core Intel system before was to buy a Xeon processor, which are not only much more expensive than Intel’s consumer CPUs, but are not overclockable.

• ASUS has waited for the X99 chipset to bring LGA2011 system feature parity up to the level of its high-end LGA1150 boards, and this is probably a good thing.

• ASUS has continued tweaking their feature set. For example, while both X79 and X99 have onboard fan controllers, the X99 supports both PWN and 3-pin fans, while the X79 could only control PWM fans. And the ability to control the allocation of PCI-E lanes between graphics cards and an m.2 SSD is a nice touch.

• Like the earlier X79-based LGA2011 systems, the X99-DELUXE is a premium product for users with a real need for computational horsepower and money to burn.

I look forward to more extensive testing of this system!

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