Asus ROG Strix X299-E Gaming

A solid contender to enter the Core-X market

PRICE $ 589 www.asus.com

Given the high reputation of the Strix brand, we were rather happy to see that Asus hadn’t slapped an $800 price on this mothboard. It’s well within the pricing range of more affordable X299 boards (which is still rather expensive). Yet Asus has managed to deliver a wellbalanced product, with a solid feature set and respectable performance.

We really appreciate the sticker that Asus puts on the memory slots, that show exactly how to populate them depending on how many sticks you use. Other boards use some rather strange memory slot configurations, so this little sticker saved us from having to browse through a 100 page manual. Speaking of memory, Asus rates this up to DDR44133MHz.

There are just three full length PCIe x16 lanes on this board, along with two x4 lanes and a single x1 lane. As expected, Asus has gone to town with the lighting on this board, supporting its Aura RGB technology. Yet there only seem to be two lighting zones on the board, but it is possible to plug in an RGB strip.

Twin M.2 drives can be mounted under the rather large heat spreaders, and there’s even room for a small fan if you want to install one yourself – it’d be kind of nice if Asus had done that for owners already though. A single Intel® I219V Ethernet port is included, which includes Asus’ own antisurge technology to stop unhealthy zaps frying your board. Asus has used its own version of the ALC1220 chip, the ‘SupremeFX 8Channel High Definition Audio CODEC S1220A’, which has slightly better SnB ratios than the basic ALC1220.

There’s plenty of room for fans, with a total of one CPU FAN header, one CPU_Opt FAN, twin Chassis FAN, one M.2 FAN, another AIO Water Pump and finally a custom water pump header that we assume delivers extra power. As for other onboard overclocking options, there’s really not much to said. A single BIOS flashback button is included on the I/O panel, but there are no onboard buttons other than a small power button.

Asus has stuck with the default eight SATA 3 ports offered by the X299 chipset, and has also stuck with a rather standard USB setup. There’s a header for a USB 3.1 Gen 2 front panel connector port(s), while at the rear we have an ASMedia USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller that handles twin USB 3.1 Gen 2 port(s), one of TypeA, the other USB TypeCTM. Finally, there are four USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and another two USB 2.0 ports.

Asus has delivered a wellbalanced product, with a solid feature set and respectable performance

When it comes to performance, this board took out the second spot in nearly every test. Considering it’s just $70 or so more than other boards, that’s a pretty healthy increase. The 4.35GHz overclock wasn’t so impressive, but we think like all X299 boards, getting your hands dirty is the way to go rather than relying on automated processes. Overall this is a very solid platform; affordable, fast, and a decent feature set, without burning your bank account to the ground. BENNETT RING