ASUS TUF X299 Mark 1 Review
Up Close cont
M.2 drives have rapidly overtaken SSDs as the weapon of choice for those who seek the very highest transfer rates, and as the drives get faster the need to keep them cool to get the most consistent performance is placed higher on the agenda. The X299 TUF Mark 1 has a heatspreader built in to the TUF Armor to work in conjunction with the fan to help your M.2 drive run at its peak. It’s slightly disappointing to see a vertical M.2 mount included. No matter how often we see them we still dislike them, perhaps even more than we dislike the vertical SATA ports of old.
Everywhere you look there are fan headers, dedicated Pump headers for your AIO and headers covering USB ports as RGB LED Strips. We’ve rarely seen so many headers on a single motherboard, so there is no chance that you’ll run out of cooling capabilities. We had to smile at the “DRAM” sign above the DIMM slots. As if you’d try and put anything else in them.
The days when you had a strange set of unlabelled LEDs to indicate what was going wrong with your system are thankfully slipping into history. Even so we are big fans of the way that ASUS have blended the sign posts into the TUF Armor.
Connectivity is plentiful. Alongside the M.2 drive slots we saw earlier there are 8 SATA Ports on the inside and, around the back, 10 USB ports of various types including the all important USB 3.1 Type-C, and the RJ45 connectors for the dual-Gigabit LAN.
