ASUS ROG Strix X99 mobo review: Built for gamers

The first ever ROG Strix motherboard

Intel’s new Broadwell-E processors have sparked off a round of motherboard refreshes from the various manufacturers. There isn’t a new ultra-enthusiast platform to replace Intel’s X99 chipset (it debuted in 2014), but god forbid that board makers let you plug that precious 10-core Intel Core i7-6950X into something that launched in 2015.

These new Intel X99 motherboards are coming in hot and fast, and most of them are actually riding on what appears to be one of the biggest trends in computer hardware now – RGB lighting. Whether that term elicits a whoop or groan from you (seriously, some of this stuff is really lurid, and not in a good way at all), the fact remains that RGB illumination has become de rigueur on high-end gaming components today.

They’re the norm, rather than the exception, and regardless of whatever fancy name has been appended to them – ASUS Aura, Gigabyte Spectrum, or MSI Mystic Light – they all do more or less the same thing.

The new ASUS ROG Strix X99 Gaming is a perfect example of a board that taps into these trends. As the first motherboard to debut under ASUS’ ROG Strix branding (previously reserved mostly for graphics cards), the ROG Strix X99 Gaming was calculated to make quite a fashion statement.

Striking, yet not too garish

Happily enough, ASUS has done up the board in quite a tasteful manner. It is very easy on the eyes, and you’ll have the option to turn the LEDs off if you’re aiming for a more subtle look. Nevertheless, we think that the majority of people who buy the ROG Strix aren’t aiming for subtle, and they’re going to want to take full advantage of the onboard LEDs.

With that said, the entire board is actually rather muted in appearance, and is only punctuated by the neon orange decals on the I/O cover and PCH heatsink, which actually echo the copper accents of ASUS’ other ROG products. But if orange isn’t your thing, you can actually switch out for a different color. The board comes bundled with three different colored sticker decals which you can stick over the I/O shroud and PCH heatsink, which may come in handy if you want the board to match your choice of lighting.

The translucent PCIe slot clips will light up when the board is powered on, as will the area around the I/O shroud and the Republic of Gamers logo below the CPU socket.

The lights are controlled via the ASUS Aura lighting control software, and it will work with any ASUS’ ROG Strix graphics card, as long as the card supports the Aura lighting. We tested the board with the ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080, and the software automatically detected the card, which made customizing the lighting effects relatively hassle-free.

For starters, you can choose to control the LEDs on the motherboard and graphics card as a single group, or you can opt to tweak them separately. There’s a considerable amount of fine-grained control over this, and the board actually has three separate zones – Back I/O, Center, and PCIe – that can be customized independent of each other.

To cap things off, ASUS has even made it possible for you to set the lights to change in response to the CPU temperature or the beat of your favorite track.

But what if the board still doesn’t have enough bling for you? If that’s the case, you’ll probably appreciate the inclusion of a 4-pin RGB header at the bottom of the board. This will work with third-party 5050 RGB LED strips and supports up to 2 meter strips. Strips connected via this header can be controlled through the Aura software as well, so you can synchronize the lighting effects across the entire system with little trouble.

Built with gamers in mind

Even though it is a Republic of Gamers board, the ROG Strix X99 Gaming doesn’t actually sit on top of ASUS’ product stack. Instead, it’s intended to plug the gap between the premium X99-Deluxe II and the X99-A II. To that end, it offers a good mix of gaming-oriented and overclocking features, without quite requiring you to sell a kidney to buy it at S$599.

The board uses an 8-phase power design, complete with what ASUS calls its OC Socket, which is really a CPU socket with extra pins that provides more stable voltage to the CPU for better overclocking performance. Still, it’s worth noting that some variant of the latter feature has made its way to boards from other brands as well, so it’s really par for the course at this point in time, just like RGB LEDs.

Eight DDR4 DIMM slots flank the LGA 2011-v3 CPU socket, and the board can take up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM. It officially supports memory up to speeds of 3,333MHz, although you should technically be able to achieve faster speeds with one of the many high-speed kits that have made their way to market. And if you install one of the new Broadwell-E CPUs, they will actually support faster DDR4-2400 memory, up from DDR4-2133 on Haswell-E.

However, ASUS has helpfully included an additional 4-pin CPU header for extra power during overclocking. The board will run fine with just the standard 8-pin connector hooked up, but enthusiasts looking to achieve more extreme clock speeds, and those who dabble in LN2 overclocking, will probably want to take advantage of the additional connector. 

Then there’s the array of gaming-oriented features, like SupremeFX Audio and ROG GameFirst IV utility. The beefed-up onboard audio solution is a familiar presence on ASUS’ ROG boards. It builds on the Realtek ALC1150 audio codec, and you get goodies like dual TI R4580 op-amps to drive audiophile-grade high-impedance headphones up to 300Ω and Japanese-made Nichicon audio capacitors. And because of just how many components there are on the board, there’s also the requisite EMI cover and electromagnetic shielding that protects audio signal path from unwanted interference.

Networking is handled by the Intel I218-V controller, and there’s just a single Gigabit LAN port at the rear. Intel’s controller is traditionally regarded as more reliable than some other competing solutions, and ASUS has generally favored it over other solutions like the Killer E2400 controller. The GameFirst IV utility is a nice bonus – it’s essentially a QoS software that lets you monitor and manage your network connections and prioritize games that require lower latencies.

The board supports wireless connections as well, and it comes with a 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi module. MU-MIMO is also supported (in a nutshell, this technology improves wireless performance by allowing data to be transmitted to multiple devices simultaneously), so you’ll get to take advantage of the newest routers that support the technology. But while there may not be dual LAN ports, ASUS actually allows you to team your wired and wireless connections for greater bandwidth, so that should satisfy those of you looking for some sort of teaming feature.

When it comes to expansion card options, you get a total of three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, and two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. The board officially supports up to 3-way SLI and CrossFire setups, although NVIDIA’s recent moves suggest that enthusiasts won’t have much use for the third PCIe 3.0 slot if they upgrade to the new Pascal cards. Don't forget that graphics cards aren't the only ones to benefit from dedicated PCIe slots as you'll increasingly find a need for speedy PCIe based SSD storage. So there's still plenty of use for spare PCIe slots.

The PCIe 3.0 slots draw lanes from the CPU itself, and this can be either 28 or 40 lanes, depending on your chip. For three-way configurations, the cards will run in x8/x16/x8 mode with a 40-lane CPU, and x8/x8/x8 with a 28-lane CPU.

The topmost PCIe slot has also been reinforced with metal. ASUS calls this design SafeSlot, and it’s similar to MSI’s Steel Armor and Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable Metal Shielding. In a nutshell, metal was integrated with the slot during the manufacturing process, and the slot is then more firmly anchored to the PCB with additional solder points. This should help the board withstand the weight of heavy cards, and reduce the risk of accidental damage to the slots when adding or removing cards.

When it comes to storage options, the onboard U.2 and M.2 connectors get their share of four PCIe lanes from the CPU, but because the bandwidth is shared, you won’t be able to populate both connectors at the same time. In addition, the M.2 socket actually only supports PCIe drives, so SATA drives will not work.

With that said, we like how ASUS has positioned the M.2 socket to the bottom right, away from heat-generating components like the graphics card. The compact size of M.2 drives means they are sometimes more susceptible to throttling due to high temperatures, and it’s nice to see that ASUS has attempted to account for that.

Finally, here’s a look at the available SATA and rear I/O ports. You’ll find a total of eight SATA 6Gb/s ports and one SATA Express port, which is compatible with two further SATA 6Gb/s ports. One advantage of the Intel X99 chipset over Z170 is the number of SATA ports available through the PCH, and all of these are exposed through the chipset without the need for any third-party controllers.

On the rear I/O, there are four USB 2.0 (black), four USB 3.0 (blue), a USB 3.1 Type-A port (red), and a USB 3.1 Type-C port. In addition, you get things like a legacy PS/2 port, screw ports for the Wi-Fi module, and 7.1-channel analog audio connectors. Note also the BIOS flashback button, which will let you easily update the BIOS without having to boot into the BIOS or operating system. However, the BIOS flashback port doesn't have any identifying markers, and we had to refer to the manual to learn that it was the blue USB port to the left of the USB-C connector.

Test Setup

Here's the system configuration we used to test the ROG Strix X99 Gaming:

• Intel Core i7-6950X (3.0GHz, 25MB cache)
• 2 x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2133 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-36)
• MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G (GeForce Driver Version 368.81)
• Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SATA 6Gbps solid state drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

We don’t have many Intel X99 motherboards to compare the board with, especially since we've chosen to use the new 10-core CPU, so we’ve settled with figures from one of MSI’s latest boards, the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon, to provide a point of reference for the ROG Strix X99 Gaming’s performance.

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Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were used to test the motherboards:

• BAPCo SYSmark 2014 (ver 1.5.1.47)
• SPECviewperf 12.0.2
• Cinebench R15
• Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

SYSmark 2014

SYSmark is a general productivity benchmark suite that measures the response times of tasks on a PC using real-world applications like Microsoft Office 2013 and Adobe Photoshop and simulated user input. Task response times are used to generate a performance rating that reflects actual user experience, so the faster a PC responds to application workloads, the higher its score will be. The method of measuring response times can take many forms, such as the time it takes for an application to show a pop-up completion message, or how long it takes a progress dialog to disappear and for a user to regain application control.

All in all, we weren’t expecting any major differences in performance, given that we were running identical setups on both motherboards. This was the case in SYSmark, which evinced negligible differences between the two boards. The MSI board took the lead in the overall score, but for all practical intents and purposes, the boards performed the same here.

Maxon Cinebench R15

Cinebench is a benchmark tool used to compare CPU performance across different systems, so we’ll be using it to evaluate how well the Intel Core i7-6950X plays with the two motherboards. The test scenario uses all of the system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene, making use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

Once again, performance was remarkably close, but the lead went to the ASUS board this time.

SPECviewperf 12.0.2

SPECviewperf is used to measure the 3D graphics performance of systems in professional applications. Each individual workload, called a viewset, represents graphics and content from an actual real-world application. Compared to SPECviewperf 11.0, this latest version of SPECviewperf includes updated traces from the latest application versions and is designed to provide a more accurate indication of GPU performance in the actual applications.

SPECviewperf actually runs a total of eight different viewsets, but we’ve picked just three to display here. The maya-04 viewset is derived from Autodesk’s Maya 2013 application. Lightwave-01 from PTC is no longer tested – instead, it’s been replaced by creo-01, also from PTC. We also included the new energy-01 viewset, which puts the board through some professional volume rendering applications.

The results were once again too close to call here. For certain benchmarks, the differences even amounted to less than a single point. Suffice to say, the boards are neck-and-neck with each other in terms of performance.

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark is a synthetic gaming benchmark that tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stresses your hardware in turn to assess its performance. And because of the physics test that keeps the GPU load low while running gameplay physics simulations on the CPU, all three 3DMark Fire Strike tests scores also include an element of CPU performance.

Both boards traded blows here, with the ASUS motherboard coming ahead in Fire Strike, and the MSI taking the lead in Fire Strike Extreme and Ultra. Having said that, the differences are again too little to make a difference in real-world performance.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Finally, we ran Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to get an idea of gaming performance. As per the graph, the differences were minuscule as expected, with both the ASUS and MSI boards coming within a single frame of each other at all the tested resolutions.

Temperature

We measured the temperatures of the VRM and PCH heatsinks after running 25 loops of the new Fire Strike stress test.

As it turns out, both boards feature relatively similar heatsink designs (there are no additional heatpipes linking the VRM and PCH heatsinks for instance), and they turned out relatively similar temperatures.

Power Consumption

To test power, we ran the energy-01 viewset in SPECviewperf 12.0.2 and recorded the peak power consumption.

The ASUS ROG Strix X99 Gaming had a lower idle and peak power consumption than the MSI motherboard. It’s still not a significant amount, but it’s a small point in ASUS’ favor.

Overclocking

In order to assess the respective overclocking performance of the boards, we first tweaked the CPU multiplier ratio and raised the voltage accordingly. After ascertaining that the achieved clock speed was stable, we then attempted to increase the BCLK value to get smaller overclock increments. The table below shows the clock speeds we achieved, along with the CPU vCore, multiplier, and RAM frequencies. We've also included the respective BIOS versions of the boards for those who are keen to know such details.

As it turns out, we were unable to go past 4.3GHz by tweaking the CPU multiplier, and any attempts at adjusting the BCLK to achieve more minute clock speed increases also failed. Both boards actually utilize an 8-phase power design, and while we’ve said before that it’s the quality of the implementation and not the number of phases that really matters, this only goes to show how similar the two really are (they even cost the same at S$599). With that said, our result still amounted to a good increase over the default multiplier value of 30, and we managed to achieve a 23 percent performance improvement on the ASUS board after overclocking.

A gaming-oriented board with all the essentials

The ASUS ROG Strix X99 Gaming retails for S$599 locally, which as far as Intel X99 boards go, isn’t the most extravagant price we’ve seen. In fact, there are some Intel Z170 boards that cost a lot more. For instance, the Gigabyte Z170X Gaming G1 is going for a staggering S$939.

But when it comes to the Intel X99 platform, all talk of value-for-money offerings goes right out the window. This isn’t a platform you buy if you’re even remotely concerned about getting the best bang for your buck. After all, even if you get a reasonably priced board, the CPU will still set you back by a fair amount, and you’re not likely to see a commensurate increase in gaming performance.

Still, we’d argue the ROG Strix X99 Gaming offers fairly good value for it’s range of features. It doesn’t come with more niche features like Slow Mode jumpers or even support for dual BIOS, but it has all the essentials that gamers and less demanding users will enjoy. From the dedicated water pump header to the 4-pin header for an external LED strip, it’s the small details that show the effort that ASUS has made to make the board overall more useable and versatile.

Add on to that core features like a wide availability of USB (including USB 3.1 Type-C) and SATA ports, 2x2 MU-MIMO Wi-Fi, and the metal-reinforced PCIe slot, and you get an exceedingly functional board that occupies the middle ground between so-called value options and the high-end.

The ASUS ROG Strix X99 marks an encouraging debut for the ROG Strix branding in ASUS’ motherboard line-up, and we wouldn’t be surprised if ASUS continues to build on the board with future higher-end models that share the same aesthetic.

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