Asus X99-A II
A beautiful and necessary refresh
NEW CHIPS, new chips everywhere. Lovely, luscious chips. Broadwell-E is here. The Core i7-6950X has landed in all its decacored glory (see pg. 72), yet there’s a few other processors in that wicked lineup of 14nm number-crunchers that are, perhaps, more interesting to the average fellow, as he swallows the day’s sorrows down his local dive bar. Notably the i7-6800K. That six-cored, 12-thread processor makes X99 and HEDT systems more accessible to the masses than ever before. But what do you couple with a CPU like that?
How about the Asus X99-A II, a revision of Asus’s entry-level X99 signature series motherboard? There are several notable differences between the original X99-A and this Broadwellian incarnation: you’ve got a new rear I/O cover; a new VRM heatsink design; advanced RGB LED lighting included along the top of the board, and on the PCIe slots; better fan control technology, including Q-Fan 4; a reinforced PCIe slot; electrostatic discharge protection for your RJ45 Ethernet; an additional 4-pin EPS power, to help balance out processor voltage load; and the addition of a U.2 connector, located just south of the SATA connectors.
That’s a pretty hefty update, to say the least. As far as design goes, Asus has really nailed it when it comes to glitzing up one of the historically more dull components in your system. The rear I/O cover is a nice touch, and the clean style and reinvigorated heatsinks, pulled across from its Skylake signature series, work wonders on this entry-level HEDT mobo.
So, is she a performer? That depends entirely on how you configure it. By default, all Asus boards—certainly Skylake onward—have an included Asus Optimized CPU Ratio setting automatically enabled in the AI Tweaker section, buried deep within the BIOS. For those running purely vanilla chips, sans any BIOS tomfoolery, this tends to bump up the frequency by around 0.2GHz, meaning that, at stock, benchmark scores tend to be higher than those of competing motherboard manufacturers. However, keeping this enabled during overclocking quite dramatically reduces the overall performance output at higher voltages and frequencies.
As far as overclocking goes, we’ve always loved the extra effort Asus puts in to push that barrier higher. Let’s face facts here: the X79 and X99 processors’ default frequencies are always pretty sluggish, which is a shame when you consider just how ridiculous the potential is of the vast majority of these cores. The extra pins Asus has included within the socket are meant to help retain a more precise CPU VCore voltage during overclocking, meaning a more stable overclock overall. In our testing, we found this to absolutely be the case. Setting our VCore way up to 1.35V, and then running Cinebench as our load test, saw absolutely no drop or random variances at all, regardless of Vdrop. FOR THE RECORD Amazingly, we managed to get our trusty Core i7-5820K to clock up to an astounding 4.5GHz, and have it remain completely stable on only 1.375V. Impressive, to say the least, as it managed to break our own personal records in the process.
All in all, it’s a sound update to the everyman’s motherboard. For $5 extra, you get a bucketload of additional features, expandability, and options that were otherwise unavailable with Haswell-E’s X99 mobos. That said, it’s not without its flaws. For us, the biggest caveat this board has became apparent once we began work on our Build It feature (see pg. 66). Installing it into our mid-tower chassis was a nightmare—thanks to the CPU EPS power being top and center of the X99-A II, it meant we had to do some very ingenious pre-planning, just to get all the fan cables plugged in without a hitch. Although this placement is common in many of the high-end boards—as, let’s face it, they’re primarily designed to go into massive over-the-top production towers—the accessibility of the Core i7-6800K, coupled with the pricing and feature set of the X99-A II, is going to cause problems for those not willing to part with their otherwise midisized chassis.