Intel’s new Haswell-E CPU series (reviewed here) and its accompanying X99 chipset launch has had its challenges. Originally, Haswell-E was going to get a completely new socket. Although the new LGA2011-3 is not backwards compatible with previous CPUs, it does work with all coolers that worked with standard LGA2011 sockets from the X79 platform. Those late in the quarter changes made it very difficult for Intel partners to validate their X99 platforms and solidify their products lines. In fact, only partners with enough resources were able to launch on time with the August 29th embargo lift. That means, ASUS came through first, with GIGABYTE right on their heels. The rest are still catching up.
With BIOS completion, software, and driver support at front of mind, ASUS was able to complete their series in time. Hopefully, being first, doesn’t mean a sacrifice in the all important End User Experience. And with that, we’d like you to join us for a look at the brand new ASUS X99 Deluxe LGA2011-3 motherboard, but for the new Haswell-E CPU series.
Features and Specifications
There are some great features this time around in Intel’s latest X99 chipset, that really make sense and should please users looking for a flagship solution. Here are the more important ones to note on the ASUS X99 Deluxe…
- OC Socket – The LGA 2011 socket contains more pins used for monitoring and powering Haswell-E processors. The end result is better voltage control as well as steady voltages especially when overclocked.
- 5-Way Optimization – Users don’t have to manually search for the optimal overclock. Instead, AI Suite III comes with this feature and can auto tune your Haswell-E processor with a press of the virtual button.
- 802.11ac WiFi – An integrated three x three controller manages up to 1300 Mb/s bandwidth which is always a plus for gamers and content creators.
- Onboard 32 Gb/s M.2 x4 slots – Add an M.2 PCIe x4 device for performance storage.
- PCIe M.2 x4 add-on port card – Add a second M.2 PCIe x4 device for even more performance.
- Fan Extension Card – A fully manageable extension card allows users to control fans individually, or through the AI Suite software via Fan Xpert 3.
- Full Fan BIOS Control – The fan headers can manage 3pin and 4pin fines regardless of PWM control.
One thing that we did notice was that the M.2 port supports PCIe SSDs and not a M.2 SATA based ones. Therefore, it doesn’t have native SATA support for an M.2 SATA. It will only support M.2 PCIe SSDs. So if you bought a SATA based M.2 SSD, you won’t be able to use it on this board.
From ASUS’ handy picture, users can easily see what kind of connectivity the X99 Deluxe offers. Sure, the connectivity and layout appear standard. But, having a BIOS Flashback button makes it easy to recover from a BIOS goof.
With dual band 802.11ac offering such great throughput, you’ll find it onboard, along with dual INTEL Gigabit ethernet ports. Audio is taken care of with their Crystal Sound 2, which takes advantage of all the right PCB and audio improvements to clean the audio up. Granted, it’s not exactly what high end audiophiles may require, but it should prove to be one of the better onboard solutions.
As you can see, ASUS loaded the X99 Deluxe with as many features that they could ready for launch. The board also commands a flagship price of $399 US at launch, making it one of the more expensive offerings.
What’s in the Box?
So what do you get for $399 US in an X99 board from ASUS? Quite a bit!
There are eight SATA cables, a WiFi antenna, SLI/CrossFireX bridges, black matching IO shield, Easy Connect front panel and USB headers, a couple auxiliary cables for add-on components, manuals and software discs. The drivers are pretty recent but do check the ASUS support page for updated drivers.
Also in the box is an M.2 PCIe add-on card which supports a single x4 PCIe SSD. Keep in mind it has to be an M.2 PCIe SSD and not an M.2 SATA SSD as mentioned earlier. For best results, plug it in to one of the PCIe x4 (smaller) slots, or an x16/x8 slot. The card will simply scale back to x4 so don’t waste your money on any faster M.2 format. And, of course, you can see there’s a 4pin card with a 4pin Molex power port, which gives you additional ports to control and adjust your fans.
So overall, a very complete bundle. Let’s have a look at the board itself next!
Closer Look
First off, the white shielding and heat sinks are especially nice. Subjectively, most every onlooker has said they like the white on black theme far better than the previous gold on black. Only one or two people have stated they really didn’t have a preference. Personally speaking, the theme is really nice but there aren’t many memory kits or coolers that match. Hopefully, kits will start coming out in an “arctic white” motif and in DDR4.
You can see there are five PCIe slots and one x4 gen PCIe slot. There are a lot of PCIe lanes (40 total) which means there’s a lot of bandwidth available if you plug in several PCIe x16 or x8 devices. Provided that you are using the right processor as lower end Haswell-E parts (like the 5820K) will limit the lanes to only 28.
Now that we’ve had a good look at the hardware, let’s get setup for testing!
System Setup Notes
Since Z87, there have been a few industry wide odd USB glitches. Especially in regards to drivers and port activation. This is when an old school PS2 mouse or keyboard comes in handy. If your USB devices are active in the BIOS but not active when booting to Windows, you have an OS-USB driver problem. If your devices are dropping without reason, it may be the BIOS.
We found the rear IO USB ports refused to detect a few of the USB gaming headsets in the lab and slow to detect a Corsair K70 keyboard and Vengeance mouse. Hopefully, these can be rectified quickly as this can ruin a user’s experience, if they don’t have a box of peripherals to play around with.
If you ever run in to these issues, you can often boot in to Windows’ Safe Mode with Networking (F8 at BIOS Boot) and more often your USB devices will work so you can at least download and install the latest drivers. Keep all this in mind if you’ve mirrored your drive using Acronis or similar software, or if you’ve run in to similar issues.
Here’s the test system today…
- Processor: Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell-E
- Motherboard: ASUS X99 Deluxe (as tested)
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB 2800 MHz DDR4
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB
- Storage: Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD
- Storage Tests: Thermaltake X5 USB 3.0
- Power: Thermaltake ToughPower 1200W Gold
- OS: Windows 7 Pro (fully patched)
- Peripherals: Corsair K70 mechanical keyboard, Mionix NAOS 3200, Corsair Vengeance M65, Gamdias EROS Stereo USB headset, Triton USB 7.1 headset,
There were only minor software installation glitches using the ASUS’ all-in-one bundle. The system blue screened a couple times at the end of the installation. While it couldn’t be 100% attributed to a Windows 7 Pro or driver glitch, the software would install individually after reboots. The issue could be reproduced which may be just early driver hiccups.
Lets take a look at the updated BIOS and see if it remains truly user friendly.
The New ASUS X99 Deluxe BIOS
The ASUS UEFI BIOS gets some new updates. Overall, ASUS’ BIOS still continues to be a very detailed, logical, and for the most part, informative experience. Like all BIOS, this one will take a little practice to master given some of the architectural changes to Haswell-E like the use of straps.
The intro page contains all the pertinent options needed to just get set up from controlling fans to setting up the boot order. It also includes EZ System Tuning which offers Normal performance, ASUS Optimal, which is slightly boosted performance, and Power Saving, which can shed unused, unnecessary wattage.
Similarly, the EZ Tuning Wizard (F11) feature shows your system configuration, lets you select your PC scenario (daily computing or gaming/media encoding), has you select what type of CPU cooler you’re using (very important for overclocking), and then shows you the estimated overclocking result. In our system, it revealed a 32% CPU and 43% DRAM performance increase with the parts listed above.
Results will vary greatly depending on your CPU and other components. But let’s have a look at some other features that can push your overclock even higher!
ASUS AI Suite and Overclocking
While AI Suite III receives updates to support Haswell-E, it’s the Dual Intelligent Processors 5 (DIP5) program that is of particular interest to enthusiasts. DIP5 does a great job of helping automatically overclock your system. Unfortunately, it displayed the incorrect temp during testing in the lab, which may be some early software glitches not worked out yet.
To start the process, simply press the 5-Way Optimization button and the system will take about 15 minutes or so to find a stable overclock. At first pass, our Core i7-5960X reached 4.7 GHz on the ASUS X99 Deluxe, except it wasn’t 100% stable so the system backed down to 4.6 GHz where it was able to run benchmarks and load tests. And, of course, users can flip the TPU switch to get a bit more CPU frequency.
Granted, it’s a conservative overclock but it’s 100% stable, and pretty good for an automated attempt.
Additionally, Turbo App List (TAL) allows users to add an .exe (or program executable) to the list, under certain overclocked conditions. For example, when you activate the program .exe, the TAL will automatically overclock your system to whatever frequency you assign to each corresponding .exe. So, games or project software can get more performance quickly if needed, without having your system pushed 24/7, and wasting power.
Now that we’ve gotten a good idea of how the setup process and BIOS/software look, let’s see how all this performs!
Performance Results
A few of these benchmarks you may recognize from our original Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell-E review. It’s important to include them as the X99 platform isn’t the right choice for mainly gaming simply due to the overall cost premium. Granted, Intel nor its partners are going to discourage buying the Extreme series processors or any high performance X99 motherboard. But, we as reviewers and regular consumers like yourselves, must point out that $700 to $900 will buy you a surprisingly capable quad Core i7 + Z97 system that will game for years.
That said, the Intel X99 chipset and its new processors, are truly meant for content creation, in particular, video editing/transcoding, audio encoding, rendering, and compiling projects. Or basically, any tasks that take advantage of more cores and more threads.
In order to get warmed up, here are some SLI Gaming benchmarks with Metro Last Light, Battlefield 4, Assassin’s Creed III, and Crysis 3. Intel Core i7-4790K – Z97 and Core i7-4770K – Z87 scores were included in some of the test results to give you an idea of comparative performance. We’ll then move on to more multi-threaded tests.
Gaming Performance
As you can see, Z97 and Z87 are still perfectly great gaming systems, especially in SLI. The SLI action is more than enough to handle maximum possible tessellation and game settings. Games loaded very quickly on X99 or Z97/Z87 systems thanks to M.2 SSD support onboard.
H.264 GraySky 5.0
Here we see the X99 providing a stable platform for hours of transcoding with GraySky 5.0 benchmark. (It’s free to download, so have a go yourself.) Again, this is something you absolutely must have a stable board for or else you end up wasting hours of rendering time for a project.
CineBench R15
Rendering is a seemingly easy task for the Haswell-E processor. There are plenty of software titles similar to CineBench that require processor stability and can take advantage of multiple cores and threads. The X99 Deluxe did well all the way up to 4.6 GHz. And with 8 cores and 16 threads, it certainly chews up lesser cored/threaded processors.
IO Connectivity
With M.2 PCIe, M.2 SATA, or just SATA Express being offered by partners, transfer rates and bandwidth have increased in Intel’s next generation platforms. You can see there’s a performance bonus to supporting M.2 x4 using the Plextor PX-G256M6e M.2 PCIE SSD.
Moving to LAN connectivity, the WAP is about 20 feet from the test bench to represent a typical distance. Make sure you have a decent dual band, or tri-antenna 802.11n or 802.11ac router to feed the integrated 802.11ac WiFi controller. And, of course, ASUS’ USB 3.0 Boost continues to be a fast option over standard USB 3.0 performance.
Overall, everything checks out here with some impressive numbers, especially in multithreaded apps. And of course, the board offers quick connectivity. But what about audio performance on this $399 US board? Let’s dig into that next.
Audio Performance
ASUS set the audio pace early a few years ago by putting more effort in to their ROG series which carried down to the channel boards. Z87 continued that trend making integrated audio a noiseless and slightly more impressive feature. Boards with amplifiers really stand out when it comes to gaming and media. That said, here’s what the X99 Deluxe does for audio.
Thanks to ASUS’ implementation, the audio is a bit more robust than the Z97 platforms, which were slightly better than any X79 board before it. Volume isn’t really a problem for the board if you have a passive analog or USB headset (which bypasses the onboard audio anyway). It’ll probably be more than you need for extended periods of gaming or jamming to your favorite music. But overall, it was an enjoyable experience with no issues, and great fidelity.
Quality Control – EMF and EMI
Here, we took a close look at component placement, implementation, materials quality like PCB, and component noise. A lot of times, these bleed over in to the audio performance but not this time.
There weren’t any crooked components or questionable factory issues like bad solder. The PCB also feels quite sturdy which is required when pairing with heavy CPU coolers and high end video cards. The board was, for the most part, rather quiet throughout most of the benchmarks. If the board was making any noise, it was well below the Thermaltake 3.0 Ultimate liquid cooler which emits a very low noise level to begin with.
One of the last aspects often overlooked is audio popping when turning the system on and off. Thankfully, the board didn’t emit any popping or line noise. And we experienced no other overheating or issues with individual components that would cause concern. It’s definitely a well built board.
Final Thoughts
What can you do with an ASUS X99 Deluxe paired with a Haswell-E processor? Simply put, anything!
Honestly though, far be it from us to tell anyone how to use their ASUS X99 Deluxe – Core i7 Haswell-E combo. But, typically, pro users will be looking for the most stable performance while using it productively in content creation or multithreaded scenarios. However, should some gaming or overclocking ensue, there is a plethora of high performance tweaking options readily available at the click of a mouse button. Users have the option to use the TPU option (conservative overclock), EZ Tuning System (conservative overclock), and EZ System Tuning (F11 in the BIOS for aggressive overclock).
Ultimately, we found the Dual Intelligent Processors 5 (DIP5) program to be one of the best features for overclocking and tweaking the ASUS X99 Deluxe. The 5-Way Optimization is extremely aggressive if not almost too aggressive achieving a 4.6 GHz overclock. However, users can pick the OC frequency they want as well with ease. After some use, everything worked flawlessly sticking with a 4.5 GHz overclock. Still, it’s too bad DIP5 doesn’t work on all motherboards in their line up.
That said, a couple minor issues arose. The software bundle installation didn’t go superbly smooth with some bluescreening. And DIP5 can be a bit too aggressive finding an overclock it supports, but isn’t 100% stable and didn’t detect CPU temps accurately. Finally, the rear IO USB ports would not detect a few USB headsets. Only when they were connected to the front case panel USB ports did the headsets properly detect. The keyboard and mice eventually detected after some patience. These are definitely user experience issues that need to be ironed out.
Still, the ASUS X99 Deluxe was, overall, superbly stable at all times whether gaming or hard at work. Additionally, the connectivity is top notch offering everything that could be possibly needed to store data or access a network, wired or wireless.
In the end, with a little more driver polishing, ASUS engineers should be able to fix these minor issues we experienced in short order. Currently, the ASUS X99 Deluxe carries a premium price tag of $399.99 US making it one of the more expensive options available. And because of that, and the minor issues, we have to knock it down a bit because at that price point, we expect near perfection. But if BIOS issues get ironed out in short order, this could be one of the classic boards of this chipset series.
Pros
- Stable X99 platform
- Aggressive overclocking features
- DDR4 overclock support outpaces most processors
- Great connectivity
- Dual Intelligent Processors 5 – Tuning and Overclocking
- Comprehensive AI Suite III
- Very attractive cosmetics
- No power BIOS flash USB feature
Cons
- DIP5 showing incorrect CPU temp(s)
- DIP5 aggressive overclock wasn’t 100% stable
- Rear USB not detecting devices
Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10.0
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