ASUS Prime X299 Edition 30 Review

Up Close – Packaging and Overview

ASUS have been adopting a more minimalist approach to their packaging in recent years and the Prime Edition 30 takes this to its logical conclusion with almost nothing at all visible except some lines to ape the heatsink design and the product name. Even the reverse side is an exercise in simplicity. Very nice indeed.

  
  

Certainly if you’ve grown weary of the “all-black with RGB” aesthetic that has come to dominate the market you’ll be pleased with the white on black looks of the Prime 30. The only bits of black PCB that show will quickly be covered up by your RAM, GPU and CPU cooling so you’ll be left with only white showing. Perfect if you have a case that resembles the inside of a fridge.

  

The business end of the X299 Prime Edition 30 has the latest Intel socket for their 10th Generation CPUs, 8 DIMM channels and a seriously chunky heatsink to keep those 16 power phases thermally in check. We’ll look closer at everything else on the next page.

  

At the bottom end we have three PCI Express 3.0 slots sitting alongside the heat spreaders for the M.2 and a very attractive chipset headsink. Whilst we know white isn’t to everyone’s taste, we think the Prime Edition 30 is one of the best looking white motherboards we’ve seen since the Sabranco.

  

The rear IO shows the full breadth of the features the Prime 30 has to offer. There are Thunderbolt 3 DisplayPort and USB connections, Intel’s Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless sytem, an Aquantia 5G ethernet for those of you with beefy home networking setups, a regular Gigabit LAN for us normal folks, 8 channel audio and the ASUS BIOS Flashback port which lets you flash the BIOS with the system off.