Layout

With X99 ASUS decided to change the color scheme of their Classic series motherboards. They've moved away from black and gold to black and white. You find a black PCB as well as coolers with white elements. As you might have expected, the layout has been well thought and there is for example enough clearance around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. If you want to install extra long graphics cards, there will be no issues, thanks to the angled SATA ports.



The ASUS X99-A comes with a digital 8+4 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memory gets a stable current supply from four individual phases. Furthermore ASUS equips this board with their so called "BlackWing Chokes". Apart from that these chokes can cope with up to 60A per phase. A closer look at the capacitors reveals there are 10K Black Metallic Caps, which have an average life span of 10'000 hours.



Totally you'll find eight DIMM-slots on the X99-A. Officially supported are DDR4 3200 (O.C.) / 2800 (O.C.) / 2666 (O.C.) / 2400 (O.C.) / 2133 (O.C.). There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 2.0.



On the X99-A the southbridge is being cooled by a passiv cooling block. A closer look at the VRM area shows that there are two more heatsinks taking care of adequate cooling. Thanks to the fact, that the new Core i7-5960X as well as Core i7-5930K support a total of 40 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, there is no need for an additional PLX chip. 40 lanes are sufficient for 4-way setups and there are even 8 lanes left to install for example a powerful PCIe SSD (should there still be space on the board). When it comes to this particular board and multi GPU setups we have to mention, that since the second and the third PCIe slot are right next to one another you can install a maximum of three VGAs.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 3 - Features	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 4 - Layout	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 19 - Tomb Raider
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 21 - Thief
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 22 - Right Mark Audio Analyzer
Page 9 - 3DMark	Page 23 - BCLK Overclocking
Page 10 - 3DMark 11	Page 24 - Power Consumption
Page 11 - 3DMark Vantage	Page 25 - Performance Rating
Page 12 - PC Mark 8	Page 26 - Price Comparison
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1	Page 27 - Conclusion
Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2