Layout

Already at a first glance the ASUS X99 Strix is a great looking motherboard, with a simple yet attractive color scheme. Most of the board is black and there are some elements gray and some silver. Apart from that there is the RGB lighting we already mentioned, which allows you to make the board shine in your preferred color. The layout itself is well thought and since ASUS is always taking Intel's reference specifications regarding socket clearance into account, there is enough space to install large aircoolers. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allows an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.



The ASUS X99 Strix comes with a digital 8+4 phase power design. The CPU is backed by eight phases and the memory receives 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.




There are eight DIMM-slots on the X99 Strix. Officially supported is DDR4 with up to 3333 MHz. There is enough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you won't run into any compatibility problems with large coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 2.0.


The heatsinks of today’s motherboards, especially when it comes to the high-end motherbaords, greatly add to the overall looks of a product. What ASUS is doing usually when it comes to their ROG motherboards is changing the shape of the individual blocks by a little bit in order to freshen up the looks in general. A great idea, which emerged during the past year was to make the VRM cooler next to the DIMM slots on the left side cover the I/O connectors. This way the design appears to be cleaner and less crowded. Looking for heatsinks we find two aluminum blocks covering the VRM area, another block below the CPU socket and one additional heatsink cooling the PCH. The two latter blocks have been integrated into ASUS's so called Aura, lighting system.

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