Presentaion / Layout / I/O / Bundle

Presentation

The M5A99X EVO comes with ASUS' standard color scheme for mid range motherboards which uses black and blue as main colors. Therefore the heatsinks are blue and the PCB is kept in black. Furthermore you'll also find some white spots as well as for example light blue for DIMM slots as well as onboard power plugs. Generally design looks nice and homogenous.

Layout

All the MOSFETs as well as the current converters are being kept at adequate temperatures by quite big passive cooling elements. Furthermore there is plenty of space around the CPU socket which allows the installation of even todays bigest aircoolers without any problems. Moving a few centimeters more to the left, one can find a total of four DIMM slots which can operate at 2133 / 1866 / 1800 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066.
If we take a look at the expansion slots we see that there are three PCIe x16 slots. If you should decide to run a CrossFire or SLI setup two slots will run at x8 / x8 each. Furthermore there also are two PCI x1 slots as well a standard PCI slot. On one hand it is very practical that there is a lot of space between the first two PCIe x16 slots. On the other hand ASUS has put the third PCIe x16 slot at the bottom edge of the which means that if you should install a graphics card in this slot the connectors right below will be rendered useless.

On ASUS' M5A99X Evo you'll find three different buttons which offer special functionality. First we start with the TPU which allows auto overclocking. Sencondly there is the EPU which can optimize the system for low power consumption. Thirdly there also a MemOK! button using which you can reload safe settings for memory.

I/O

The rear panel has been well equipped. Therefore you'll find a PS/2 for the keyboard/mouse connector, eight USB2 and two USB3 ports, one ethernet port, an IEEE 1394a port, an eSATA as well as a Power eSATA and a full audio panel composed of six mini jack ports and an optical out.

ASUS equipped the M5A99X Evo with a total of six SATA III and two SATA II ports. One can also find two internal USB 3.0 as well as three USB 2.0 headers for front panel usage for example. Of course, there is also the front panel audio connector and an IEEE 1394a. ASUS also equips its motherboards with removable BIOS chips which can be very helpful if the BIOS should become corrupted.

At this point one can see the three different 3-pin fan connectors plus two additional 4-pin which have been located all over the board. As a consequence there is always a fan header when you need one.

Page 1 - ASUS M5A99X Evo	Page 8 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specifications	Page 9 - SuperPi/WPrime
Page 3 - Presentaion/Layout/I/O/Bundle	Page 10 - Games
Page 4 - BIOS	Page 11 - Asus AI Suite II / TurboV Evo Overclocking
Page 5 - Test Setup	Page 12 - Temperatures
Page 6 - FutureMark	Page 13 - Overclocking
Page 7 - SiSoft Sandra 1	Page 14 - Conclusion

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