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.