Asus Prime X299-Deluxe

Our first look at Intel’s new Skylake X platform

WHAT A TIME to be a tech enthusiast. We haven’t seen knee-jerk reactions like this since the early 2000s. Intel appears to be on the back foot, and it knows it. The response to Ryzen, though? Well, it leaves a lot to be desired. This is the first time we’ve had a good look at the X299 chipset in all its glory. The new all-encompassing HEDT platform from Intel is designed to encapsulate both the low-end and highend desktop parts—everything from fourcore, four-thread 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 at least, far less appealing than Intel would want you to believe.

Right then, compliment sandwich time. Positives first. Well, Intel has finally upgraded its direct media interface (connecting the processor to the chipset) to DMI 3.0, essentially swapping out the 4x PCIe 2.0 lanes to 3.0 lanes, doubling bandwidth in the process. No doubt 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. And, on top of that, well, there’s a few extra USB ports here, too, but that’s about it.

Now the bad. Looking at it entirely from a chipset versus chipset point, there’s still no support for USB 3.1 or 10Gb/s Ethernet. And from a platform perspective, we’re still stuck on quad-channel memory (on the processors that support it). The latter being the biggest point of contention. 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 Hyper-Threading, dual-channel memory, and a measly 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for no less than $250. Regardless of how high you can overclock these parts, the notion of paying $10 more for a processor that is, in reality, just a migrated Core i5-7600K, sans integrated graphics, is ludicrous. Especially when you can’t take full advantage of that new platform you’re investing in from the getgo. In fact, the cheapest motherboard we’ve seen is the Asus TUF X299 Mark 2, coming in at a staggering $260. So that’s $510 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 $360.

MAKING NICHE

Back to the good: Arguably, it does provide you with a substantial upgrade path if, say, you’re planning to purchase a higherspecced processor later down the line. But really? That’s niche. Real niche.

Right. Enough with the jibber jabber. How’s the X299-Deluxe looking? Well, it’s one of the priciest X299 boards available right now—coming in at a staggering $490, it’s not cheap. But, for the money, 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. On top of that, 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.

It’s one pricey piece of PCB, but the arsenal of connectivity littered across its sultry form is enough to keep any PC enthusiast happy. Whether X299 is worth it, though, well that’s hard to say right now. As usual with any new Intel process, we’re witness to a 10–20 percent increase in performance, and that’s about it. As a platform, 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, as far as we can tell, there’s very little reason to upgrade over the X99 platform.

Couple that lack of excitement with the somewhat vague price drop— seemingly in an attempt to keep pace with Ryzen’s ridiculously cheap eight-core offerings—and the overall strategy of Skylake X appears somewhat ill-timed and underwhelming. And 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.