ASUS Strix X99 Gaming Preview
Up Close continued
When the PCB has to cope with eight DIMMs there is clearly some clever design having to happen to fit all the fan headers on. Lesser manufacturers might have just reduced the number, but ASUS have squeezes them all over the place. It’s particularly nice for the builders amongst us to have “one water pump and two fans” taken as a minimum amount of CPU cooling. No more will we have to run extension spaghetti all over the place just to use our double width AIOs.
At the storage side of the Strix we find the 8 SATA 6Gb/s ports, two of which are shared with the 10Gb/s SATA Express, should you choose to use that. Below them we also see the U.2 port, promising blistering 32Gb/s bandwidth to any who can afford the drives to plug in there. Â
The bottom edge of the Strix X99 Gaming is taken up with headers for everything from the front panel connectors to USB front panel offerings and the AURA header for software controllable coloured case lighting. There isn’t a spare centimetre of PCB to be found anywhere, giving away the technologically-heavy ethos behind this latest ASUS motherboard offering.
Lastly a sneak preview of the full review. Who doesn’t love the RGB PCI Express lock tabs and Mosfet cover? Exactly. Finally a motherboard that looks as good as the components we plug into it. We would show you different colours but we have such an early sample we don’t actually have the software to change them yet!
Whilst we wait patiently for the launch BIOS to appear so that we can put it through our usual bank of testing, let us know what you think about the ASUS Strix X99 Gaming on the OC3D Forums.
