Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
ASUS offers a very serious contender in the X99 space with the Deluxe motherboard. The Deluxe series offers everything you will need and require really. And combined with that snazzy new white shield it does look rather lovely. X99 and an 8-core Intel CPU is cool stuff alright. Specs and features wise there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be the infrastructure for you 2/3/4-way SLI or Crossfire build. Next to that you will receive WIFI, WIDI, no less than eight 6 Gbps SATA 3 ports and two Sat Express ports as well as an M.2 interface, this round ticking in on a fast 32 Gbps link. There are many USB 3.0 ports assigned to the board so you will not lack them at all. Interesting to see is the improved audio segment with an extra preamp for headphones. Motherboards are slowly reaching audiophile levels, we like that. Nice to see is the fast amount of LAN connectivity with the two Gigabit Ethernet jack both based on Intel NICs, we prefer these jacks over the Killer ones. And the Wireless Ethernet WIFI functionality is just awesome on this board, passing 1 GHz and offering 1.3 GHz on wireless.
The Platform Experience
The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did before and are offering now. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice but is at the level of pretty much any previous Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.5 GHz per core for the Core i7 5960X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E will make nice difference. Add to that quad-channel DDR4 memory will offer a lot of bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes and you'll have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus with this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great length and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really.
Storage
Combined with eight SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly argue anything. SATA Express is supported in two-fold, but I foresee that'll be an un-used connector as I do not see and expect SATA Express taking off anytime soon. More interesting I find to be the all new M.2 interface, pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 700/800 Mb/sec range. Overall your SATA and M.2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance. Great to see is that the slow has obtained a x4 PCIe interface connection allowing it 32 Gbps of bandwidth to work in. To compare a little, your SATA3 port has 6 Gbps available,so that small form factor SSD solution now is very future proof. The vertical positioning of the native slot is weird, but we like weird :)
Aesthetics
We think that ASUS decided to make a move towards the white shielding after they received a lot of positive comments on the Snow White version of the Sabertooth series displayed on Computex. And you know what ? I think this might work out fine colors wise. It'll be difficult to match colors with other components like graphics cards etc, but the sheer looks overall are sweet and in a white chassis with an inner dark paint-job would look killer for sure.
Tweaking
The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what our sample can handle, and we do have a poor CPU sample in terms of tweaking. Realistically at 1.30 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 5960X at roughly 4400~4500 MHz on all cores. However we need 1.40 Volts for that. And even though that seems a little shy as a tweak, it remains to be almost 4400 MHz on 8 physical CPU cores. We learned from others that they have been able to reach 4.5 GHz on all 8-cores with just a 1.25v Vcore. Some clock great on low voltages, others behave like a pig, in our case where we needed 1.4 Volts to reach 4.4 GHz and have gotten the pig. Regardless, overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, on the contrary this board was designed to offer all features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise.
Final Words
The ASUS X99 Deluxe is a good example of what a motherboard should be like. It's interesting to see what ASUS managed to cram into a regular ATX form factor motherboard, as this thing is chucked full with cool stuff. The motherboards offers all that is needed for a long time, features like the eight SATA 6 Gbps ports, the two Gigabit Ethernet interface and that excellent WIFI solution bring a smile to my face. Then there's the 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec in conjunction with an amplifier you get support for quality headphones that have an impedance of up to 600 Ohms. This motherboard is multi-GPU ready up-to 2/3/4 way SLI/Crossfire. Then you can add features like on-board buttons, diagnostic LED, a great design, USB 3.0, SATA3, PCI-E Gen 3.0, ease of tweaking. The sky is the limit, as such everything you need from an enthusiast class Haswell-E processor platform is there. The one thing you might dislike is the design and color scheme, other than that we cannot think of any significantly negative at all. We have not received pricing info just yet though, so I will have to reserve judgment on that right now. The ASUS X99 Deluxe is a terrific product with everything included and then some more, like that funny fan HUB PCB and the extra M.2 X4 PCIe based M.2 interface card. The original m.2. slot that requires a vertical mounted SSD is a little weird, but as stated before .. we like weird. With terrific Intel Ethernet jacks and exquisite 1.3 GHz Wireless LAN ASUS sets a new standard. We can highly recommend the ASUS X99 Deluxe for the terrific features, cool looks and a build that will allow really good tweaking as well.
Nice, really nice.
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