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Asus X99 Deluxe Motherboard Review – White Can be Sexy Too

Packaging and Closer Look

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Above you see how the Asus X99 Deluxe’s box looks like. At the back you can read some of its features and specifications about the motherboard. The front cover can be flipped over revealing more of the motherboard’s features. You can also see the motherboard itself through the window, although not clearly since it’s protected by an anti-static bag.

The packaging includes all of the accessories you need to start immediately. The box includes: reading materials, a driver CD, a sticker, Asus Q-Shield, 8x SATA 6Gb/s cables, 2-Way and 3-Way SLI bridge, an ASUS 3T3R dual band Wi-Fi moving antennas, 2 in 1 Q-connectors, 5-pin to 5 pin cable and a Thermistor cable.

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You also get the Hyper M.2 X4 PCIe adapter for M.2 NGFF SSD and a fan extension card with 3x 4-pin fan out just in case the onboard fan headers aren’t enough.

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Above you see the front and rear view of the motherboard. When the Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard was first released, a lot of enthusiasts got really excited about this motherboard. The nice white shroud do look very attractive and sexy, and it is uncommon compared with previous motherboards. Not much to see at the back of the motherboards’ PCB except for the TPU chip located in the bottom center of the motherboard.

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At the back you see a BIOS flashback switch, two Intel Gigabit ports, two USB 2.0 ports (for your mouse and keyboard), 10x USB 3.0 ports, WiFi/Bluetooth antenna port, 5x audio jacks and 1 x Optical S/PDIF out.

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On the upper portion of the Asus X99 Deluxe you see the large LGA 2011-3 socket (still protected by a CPU cover) and eight DDR4 DIMM (quad channel architecture) slots supporting up to 64GB DDR4 memory and clock speeds of up to 3200MHz (OC). You also see the standard 24pin ATX power connector and 9-pin CPU power connector. The CPU FAN and OPT CPU fan header are located on the upper most left side, meanwhile a MemOK! button is located on the opposite side. Above the CPU socket you see 8x power phase DIGI+ power control. On the right hand side you see an M.2X4 PCIe 2.0 slot for M.2 NGFF SSD supporting speeds of up to 32Gb/s. There’s also two SATA 6 Gbps port located just below the M.2X4 slot.

On the lower half section of the motherboard, there are 4x fan headers, too few in my opinion. No wonder they included a fan header hub. The Asus X99 Deluxe has 5x PCIE 3.0 slots where only two of these are x16 capable. The rest are x8 slots. This means, even if you use an appropriate Haswell-E processor that can support x16/x16/x16 multi-GPU configuration, you can only do an x16/x16/x8 in a three-way SLI or CrossFireX setup. There’s a single x4 slot for expansion cards as well. There’s also an SLI/CFX switch located just below the chipset heatsink cooler. You can choose from 2-way or 3-way and the motherboard will tell you where to install the graphics cards.

Most of the motherboard’s headers are located at the bottom most portion of the board. There’s also an onboard power, reset, CLR CMOS and a debug LED for your convenience. Asus calls their new audio component the “Crystal Sound 2” that is primarily composed of the following: audio shielding, EMI protection, audio amplifier, de-pop circuit, Japanese-made audio capacitors and dedicated audio PCB layers.

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Here you have a closer look on Asus’ OC Socket. At the time this motherboard was release the patent for it was still pending. Not sure if they got the patent for this or not yet. But Gigabyte is also using a similar “improved” LGA 2011-3 socket with more pins. The additional 48 pins are said to help improve overclocking performance, stability and reduce voltage drops.

There are a total of 12 SATA 6Gbps ports, if SATA Express ports are not in use, or 2x SATA Express ports + 8x SATA 6Gbps ports. Right beside the isolated SATA ports, near the memory slot is an M.2 PCIE x4 port for NGFF SSDs. Now, let’s take a tour of the Asus X99 Deluxe’s BIOS user interface on the next page.

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Author
Peter Paul
Peter is a PC enthusiast and avid gamer with several years of hands-on experience in testing and reviewing PC components, audio equipment, and various tech devices. He offers a genuine, no-nonsense perspective, helping consumers make informed choices in the ever-changing world of technology.

2 thoughts on “Asus X99 Deluxe Motherboard Review – White Can be Sexy Too”

  1. I have one, this board is still unstable, slow boot, unstable during overclocking, lot of issues during boot, ASUS support is use less, they do not accept their mistakes of producing unstable boards. I had to change 3 ASUS deluxe boards to get one stable one.

    my other pc H87 Asrock boards boots in 8-10 seconds, but this one takes a whole minute, even with Samsung pro 128gb SSD.

    very soon I will change this board and go for Gigabyte, MSI or ASrock

    Reply
  2. I just bought the 3.1 version of this board. See lots of praise, and lots of heartache. Hope I am the former? Decided to go with x99 and 5820K instead of Z170 and Skylake i7. Hope I dont have to return it and I can OC my CPU and Ram. Got a 980 TI to go along with it. Ive built many computers, but this is my first gaming centric build. Wish me luck!

    Reply

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