ASUS Prime X299-Deluxe
Our first look at Intel’s new Skylake-X platform.
This is the first time we’ve had a good look at the X299 chipset. The new all-encompassing HEDT platform from Intel is designed to encapsulate both the low- and high-end desktop parts — everything from four-core, fourthread processors, right up to 18 cores and 36 threads. This new spec opens up more questions than answers, though, and looks to be, at first glance, far less appealing than Intel would want you to believe.
Intel has finally upgraded its direct media interface (connecting the processor to the chipset) to DMI 3.0, swapping out the 4x PCIe 2.0 lanes to 3.0 lanes, doubling bandwidth in the process. This is to cope with the extra bandwidth necessary to cater for the substantial upgrade to the integrated PCIe lanes on the chipset itself, because we’ve seen a leap up from eight PCIe 2.0 lanes to 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes. This is seemingly a leaf taken from the mainstream Z270 platform, as its expansive support for multi-GPU and PCIe SSD solutions is one of the few things that differentiates it from the competition. There’s a few extra USB ports, too, but that’s about it.
There’s still no support for USB 3.1 or 10Gb/s Ethernet, and we’re still stuck on quad-channel memory (on the processors that support it). Our main issue with X299 all comes down to how many processors this new socket supports. Intel will happily sell you a four-core Core i5 part, with no hyperthreading, dual-channel memory and a measly 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for no less than $265. Regardless of how high you can overclock these parts, the notion of paying $10 more for a processor that’s just a migrated Core i5-7600K, sans integrated graphics, is ludicrous, especially when you can’t take advantage of that new platform from the get-go. In fact, the cheapest motherboard we’ve seen is the ASUS TUF X299 Mark 2, coming in at a staggering $429. So that’s $790 to start you out in this new HEDT platform, yet without any of the perks associated with it. You could achieve identical performance with an Intel Core i5-7600K and an ASRock Z270M Pro4, for a total of $518.
Arguably, it does provide a substantial upgrade path if you’re planning to purchase a higher-specced processor later down the line. But that’s really niche.
The X299-Deluxe is one of the priciest X299 boards available — coming in at a staggering $740. You get a well-equipped board, featuring three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, an M.2 heatsink, vertical M.2, U.2 support, six SATA 6Gb/s ports, plus DDR4 support all the way up to 4,000MT/s. The RGB lighting is actually fairly classy and there’s a neat little ASUS LiveDash OLED display that shows CPU temperature, frequency, fan speed and UEFI BIOS errors.
Whether the X299 is worth it is hard to say right now. As usual with any new Intel process, we’re witness to a 10–20% increase in performance, and that’s about it. Skylake X feels lackluster in contrast to its predecessors, and even to Ryzen. We should see some interesting competition once those 12-core and above parts reach the consumer ecosphere, but until that happens, there’s very little reason to upgrade over the X99 platform.
With AMD’s EPYC-based Threadripper 16-core parts just around the corner, we’re starting to wonder whether Intel might have lost the plot on this one.