ASUS X399-E Strix Gaming Review

Conclusion

There have been a few touchstones in the lifespan of OC3D. Things that nearly always deliver. In terms of storage we've always found Samsung to be extremely reliable and fast. Barring the aberration of the GTX480, the flagship nVidia GPU is always good. We've never met a Roccat mouse we didn't like. All Corsair power supplies are great. Until now the other name on that list was the ASUS Strix.

Their Republic of Gamers arm is generally reliable too, but being so focussed upon performance there have been a few that have been too expensive for what they delivered. When the Strix range first appeared it sat in beneath the more premium ROG models and provided a similar level of performance at a slightly more affordable price. There is, however, no denying that the X399-E Strix Gaming misses the mark.

With the commitment to VRM cooling that ASUS applied to the Strix we took our life in our hands and overclocked our AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. We couldn't push it much further than stock, and the results just about made our efforts worthwhile with it just sitting ahead of the stock X399 motherboards we've tested. We would hesitate to suggest that there is enough of a benefit to do so at home though. There just isn't enough of a performance gap between it and the chasing pack to make the thermals worth tolerating.

What probably put the nail in the coffin of our overclocking efforts is the shabby stock performance the ASUS X399-E Strix Gaming gave. It was regularly at the foot of our graphs and usually tailed off by a not insignificant amount. Particularly poor was the single threaded results which have a massive effect on a lot of the regular things you'll do with your computer. In the end it meant that our overclocking efforts only brought performance back in line with the other stock X399s, rather than breaking off into the distance as we normally see when overclocking a CPU.

All of these issues do seem to say BIOS to us, especially the bad stock results. We know Asus are constantly optimising and tweaking things to make them better but as always we have to base our review on what we have in front of us. We could talk about the great layout of the Strix, how everything is in its right place. We could mention the usual ASUS features of the excellent SupremeFX audio, AURA Sync lighting, GameFirst LAN technology and other highlights. Its definitely worthy of being on your shortlist of possible options and if you are capable of being very hands on with the BIOS you will be able to get the best from it. We dont (in the tested state) see it as being a viable option for a basic plug and play user though unless you knowingly want to use this as an educational tool. Fingers crossed that a revision or two on the BIOS gets this where we think it should be anyways.

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