ASUS X99-A Motherboard Review
by Ian Cutress on December 22, 2014 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Asus
- Haswell-E
- LGA2011-3
ASUS X99-A Conclusion
The term 'budget build' means many different things depending on who you speak to. For a HTPC user, it will involve a small motherboard with integrated graphics. For a gamer it might be an i3 paired with a graphics card that doesn't require extra power, such as an R7 240. For an X99 user, the term is not so clear cut because there is no truly budget board in this market. The chipset has a lot of IO to play with, which manufacturers add on the basis that when a user buys the chipset, they have essentially already paid for it. This means buying enough connectors for 10 SATA ports, PCIe storage, multiple GPUs and so on.
The end result is that 'budget' for X99 means under $300 for the motherboard, paired with a $390 i7-5820K and some DDR4. In that sub-$300 range each manufacturer has least a single model to aim at this crowd (some more than one), and for ASUS this is the X99-A.
Off the top, the X99-A brings in 10 SATA ports, 10 USB 3.0 ports (5 from the PCH, 3 from a hub and 2 from a controller), three-way PCIe via x16/x16/x8, an M.2 x4 running at PCIe Gen 3.0 and SATA Express. Add in to the mix an Intel I218-V network port, an upgraded ALC1150 audio solution via Crystal Sound 2 and an EZ XMP button for good measure. ASUS' strengths also lie in the BIOS and software packages, offering an easy to use system.
Looking at the performance numbers, the X99-A hits the midfield across most of the system benchmarks, excelling in our audio tests and being very reasonable for power consumption. The lack of MultiCore Turbo affects it at stock speeds but a quick switch to position one of the TPU gives a 3.9 GHz overclock, and makes this less of an issue.
For users going budget, the X99-A is worth a look, especially when it is on offer. But ultimately I think that the X99-A creates the contrast to the X99-Deluxe. By comparison, the X99-Deluxe comes with tri-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi, dual M.2 x4 Gen 3.0 possibilities, and add in fan controller card, dual SATA Express, 10 rear USB 3.0 ports, a styled rear panel and audio design as well as more SATA ports, another NIC and better box contents. Is that worth the $125 difference? As a budget build, the X99-A could be paired with an i7-5820K but a user would still require almost $1000 for a full system. It is hard to say if the price difference to other motherboards is worth it, depending on what the user ultimately wants to integrate (M.2, WiFi) into their experience.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
No. Look at the pictures; 6 blue (3.0) and 4 black (2.0) USB ports.Until Intel goes all USB3 on it chipset, most boards with many ports are either going to do a mix of both types, fake it with hub chips, or both. And since the Skylake Leaks indicate we'll probably still be mixed USB (or hub) on higher end boards (midrange will probably be able to go all 3.0); it's probably going to be 2017 until USB3.x becomes ubiquitous.
kenshinco - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
You said this board doesn't implement Multicore Turbo but its specs does says Intel Turbo boost supported. Could you elaborate more on this.Does this means it will get turbo boosted for single core only? 8 cores active can not get turbo boosted?
SuperVeloce - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
This most likely means turbo boost is behaving as Intel said it should, more cores active, lower the frequency (for 5960x and all cores its usually 3-3.2ghz). Multicore turbo usually gets you highest turbo frequency for all cores (so it would leave it 3.5ghz@16threads if temperatures allow it).dcoca - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
I have this board and Multicore is there in the bios with the opt for all cores or per core...EricCC - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
Great article. I was ready to buy one until I saw the post times. 20+ seconds is horrible. My two year old Surface and one year laptop with Haswell post in 2-3 seconds and their CPUs are much slower. And my 5+ year old system is twice as fast posting.I thought EFI BIOS were supposed to be significantly faster and I expected newer machines to be faster. Have manufacturers explained the severe slowness?
Are these new motherboards any faster with Windows 8?
EricCC - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
i should have said, any faster POSTING with Windows 8?DanNeely - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
POST is the time spend *before* the boot loader starts your OS. In general, the more stuff that needs to be started up, the longer it will take to POST; however, I suspect that an additional factor vs Z97 boards which post in half the time is that more effort has been put into optimizing performance for the mass market product than for something that's mostly used in servers/etc where it's a much less important factor.EricCC - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
I am aware that POST time is pre-OS, and all the times I stated are POST only. The OS loads in around 10 seconds so most of my systems boot faster than the X99 motherboards POST. Do you think these boards would POST faster with Windows 8? I thought systems that were Windows 8 aware were able to skip part of POST or at least do something differently.I also agree that POST and boot times in servers tends not to be that important but I don't think these boards are for servers, which don't need the ability to run with multiple graphics cards or to overclock.
Do you not think that 20+ second POST times are extremely long for computers nowadays?
DanNeely - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
No. Your OS has nothing, and can have nothing, to do with POST time because your OS doesn't get involved until the POST is complete. It doesn't matter if you're running Windows 8. or Windows 7, or Windows 3.11, or Linux, or BSD, or BeOS.What Win8 does is to only partially shutdown by default when you turn it off. It closes down everything in userspace and then hibernates the kernel. Then when you power on, after the computer POSTs, and after the boot loader starts win8, win8 just unhibernates the kernel and restarts userland; which is faster than starting the OS from scratch. This also only helps if you're someone who turns his computer off on a regular basis instead of just leaving it up until the next patch tuesday; because in that case the patches require restarting the kernel.
These boards aren't going into servers; but 99% of consumer boards are LGA1150; which is where the OEMs put their effort. LGA2011 is an entry level server product; and 99% of the chipsets for them go into servers where it doesn't matter.
X99 is too small a market to justify any sort of performance tuning; the boards are already a lot more expensive than z97 because the tiny number of boards that are sold means there's not much to spread the engineering costs for the board layout over. If you wanted to lift the base price of the boards another $100+ each it might be possible to optimize the startup times down to the same 10s ballpark of z97. You'll probably never see desktop boards get down to the 1-3s range of thin laptops/tablets because the latter have so much less stuff to enable, and everything that they need to turn on and since everything is soldiered and non-replacable they can encode all the settings into the firmware instead of having to detect the components and determine how to configure them every time they're powered on.
ziphnor - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
The X99-A BIOS is full of options that allow faster POST (like not looking for other drives than the boot drive etc). So it can probably be tweaked.