Asus Prime X399-A

SPENDING FAR TOO much money on a motherboard is one of the easiest mistakes you can make as a rookie PC enthusiast. It’s easy to fall for the marketing slogans, disproportionate bar graphs, and everything else littering a manufacturer’s page, and shell out too much on a board that will likely give you just as much performance as one costing $100–200 less than the flagship.

That’s not to say there’s no reason to invest in a more premium board. I/O is a big deal, and once you start delving into the HEDT platform to look for chunky content-creation machines, it suddenly becomes far more important than any marginal gains you might see in game.

For us, the choice was obvious: the Asus Prime X399-A. With a workstation heritage, solid BIOS, and a plethora of I/O, it fits our build perfectly. We can throw in 128GB of DDR4 memory, connect the three storage devices, install multiple GPUs in the future, and still have room for our 1.2TB combined OS PCIe SSD and scratch disk.

Coupled with its solid BIOS, fantastic on-board audio, and a fairly substantial cooling solution for the VRMs, it’s a no-brainer. It also looks stellar. At first glance, when we started to scour the web for an X399 board, we assumed this mobo was coated in white. However, when it arrived, the white turned out to have a gorgeous silver brushed-metal hue to it, covering the north Digi+ Power VRM solution, the rear I/O, and the chipset at the south of the board.

For us, having an accessible and informative BIOS is a huge deal, and there are few BIOSes out there at the same level as that of Asus. Whether it’s down to its impressive design team, or the excessive market share the company has, it’s so easy to manipulate your hardware, adjust fan curves, and overclock the crap out of anything you need to do on the trusty platform.