Asus X99-Deluxe Review: Piling on as many features as possible

Asus X99-Deluxe detailed review

Boards are becoming more and more feature laden as you go up the price bracket and with the X99 platform the extent to which manufacturers are willing to go to stand apart from the crowd can bring some surprising innovations to the scene. The Haswell-E processors have the voltage regulator circuits for different segments of the platform into one single regulator circuit.

ASUS noticed that there were a few pins holes on the new socket but there weren’t missing pads on the processor. So with a little R&D it incorporated a few extra pins onto the socket to even out the power delivery to the processor. This is to allow greater headroom for overclocking but this won’t be around for long since Intel has already announced that it is ditching the FIVR (Fully Inte-grated Voltage Regulator) in the next architecture.

The board as a whole has plenty of PCIe slots but having four single-GPU graphics cards isn’t an option here. But the board is priced lower than the Gigabyte GA-X99-SOC-Force that comes with a lot of accessories bundled. Moreover, this board has a 1300 Mbps 802.11ac cum Bluetooth 4.0 adapter which makes it a much sweeter deal.

However, we’d like to men-tion that you may want to get hold of the latest BIOS (we used 0902) in order to get your memory modules to be recognised properly and the initial BIOS that the board ships with doesn’t do a great job at reading XMP profiles of modules listed on the QVL. However, adopting a new plat-form this early always has its kinks and given enough time all manufacturers will have such minor issues resolved. So nothing to worry on that front.