ASUS X299 Prime Deluxe II Review

Disclaimer: This is a personal rant. I was looking forward to this board because i like ASUS, and i like Deluxe boards. (I am rocking Z97 Deluxe now) And this could have bean the perfect board for my next system in the near future (possibly). I need Thunderbolt and I was waiting for this board's release. I would be happy if i am wrong and this sin't the case.

Amazing looking board, but it has a catastrophic flaw. I read through documentation and it is not specified anywhere, but if you look at the lane distribution Thunderbolt 3 is connected via PCH. Also there is no block diagram in the manual. Hmm... Intel platforms don't have 24 PCH lanes, they have 4. Because PCH is connected to CPU via DMI 3.0 link which is PCI-E 3 x4. So PCH is basically a PLX chip that governs the traffic. It is enough to put 1 NVME drive on PCH slot, with couple of HDDs, with all the regular traffic (USBs, Network, etc.) and DMI is clogged up. Where do you find the bandwidth then for 2 Thunderbolt 3 pots? You can't run 1 at full speed via PCH.

They could have done it with CPU lanes. They have done it before. Previous Deluxe boards had crazy lane distribution. And you could connect anything. Rampage VI Extreme has good lane distribution. You could run Dimm.2 drives from PCH or from CPU lanes. If you run it form CPU last PCI-E slot is reduced to x4 from x8. If you run them from PCH, PCI-E x4 slot is disabled. Brilliant. And what was wrong with add-in board on previous Deluxe motherboards? If you need it use it, and you have proper CPU x4 lanes. If you don't, then leave it in the box. This way if you need Thunderbolt 3 you can't use it. And you can't put add-in board. And it says it supports it.

Just a cheep marketing trick to say that board has native support for Thunderbolt 3. If you need Thunderbolt 3 connectivity don't bother with this board. It doesn't support it. Go with any other board that has Thunderbolt 3 support via add-in card.

Back to the drawing board with this one ASUS.Quote

She is a stunner, though. Man that's a bloody good looking motherboard.Quote

Also my rant is - Shame that readers have to pick up on stuff like this, this is the stuff reviewers should be highlighting.

ASUS X299 Prime Deluxe II = Crap Board = Don't buy itQuote

not to step on anyones foot here but....

reviewing today means benchmarking a few dozen apps and games. something that is completely useless for me. i don´t care about 5% performance difference.


it´s nice to know that a board is as fast as to be expected.... but that´s it.





the flaws a board has you will most likely not find on vlogs or "review" websites.

they install windows and run a few tests. then they focus on the next content to create. lately some folks focus on VRM temps and but that is as deep as it gets.

i have seen so many boards praised only to find obvious issues in real life.



example... a board has 6 SATA ports and not a single website (out of 5) mentions that 2 of them need to be disabled when you enable another feature.
it is a chipset (pci lane) limitation but all you read is "the board has 6 SATA ports".... yeah well i can see that. i can read a spec list and look at a photo.Quote

Those kind of details get covered in the initial cpu/platform review - no need to bring it up on every single board.

As for the Thunderbolt - I have no way to accurately test it (I dont have one TB enabled screen let alone 2 or 3) and to say about the bandwidth Id need to say why its required and what the impact has been - not might be.
Sometimes you just have to do the best that you can do with what you have available.Quote