ASUS X99 Deluxe LGA2011-v3 Motherboard Review

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Included Software pt.2

Included Software pt.2

ASUS CPU-Z

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ASUS CPU-Z is a special edition of CPU-Z especially created to match the aesthetics of ASUS' other software utilities. This edition is found on the included software DVD or the ASUS website, but it is not yet available for download from CPUID.com, though you can download the ROG CPU-Z version.

Turbo LAN

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Turbo LAN is a utility designed to help reduce latency courtesy of cFosSpeed traffic-shapping technology. This utility provides users with a lot of control and monitoring capabilities over every application that is accessing the network. It displays CPU usage, NPU usage, ICMP and UDP average ping, and the network utilization of every system process and program. This tool also allows you give priority to certain applications, and throttle or block others to free network resources for other applications. It is your one-stop tool for monitoring and controlling all network traffic, and it even comes with a little widget for real-time bandwidth information.

Boot Setting

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ASUS Boot Setting allows users to boot directly into the BIOS without having to repeatedly hit delete during the POST screen. It is a pretty hand tool when you are rebooting as often as overclockers tend to do.

WebStorage

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The WebStorage utility is basically the ASUS equivalent of DropBox. It is cloud computing application that gives users web storage and access to data across many devices. All ASUS motherboard owners get a free 5.5GB of storage, you can buy more or be gifted some by ASUS if you referrer your friends. The web interface is pretty standard and utilitarian. Overall, there is not much to complain about, it's a nice freebie if you choose to use it.

 

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Test Setup & Methodology

Test Setup & Methodology

For this review, we are going to be testing the performance of the ASUS X99-Deluxe in three configurations: default settings, automatic overclock settings, and manual overclock settings. The components and software are the same across all three, and aside from manually selecting the frequencies, timings, and voltages in the manual overclock configuration, every option in the BIOS was at its default setting.

Intel Core i7 LGA2011-v3 Haswell-E Test Setup​

For all of the benchmarks, appropriate lengths are taken to ensure an equal comparison through methodical setup, installation, and testing. The following outlines our testing methodology:

A) Windows is installed using a full format.

B) Chipset drivers and accessory hardware drivers (audio, network, GPU) are installed.

C)To ensure consistent results, a few tweaks are applied to Windows 7 and the NVIDIA control panel:

• UAC – Disabled
• Indexing – Disabled
• Superfetch – Disabled
• System Protection/Restore – Disabled
• Problem & Error Reporting – Disabled
• Remote Desktop/Assistance - Disabled
• Windows Security Center Alerts – Disabled
• Windows Defender – Disabled
• Screensaver – Disabled
• Power Plan – High Performance
• V-Sync – Off

D) All available Windows updates are then installed.

E) All programs are installed and then updated, followed by a defragment.

F) Benchmarks are each run three to eight times, and unless otherwise stated, the results are then averaged.

Here is a full list of the applications that we utilized in our benchmarking suite:

• 3DMark Vantage Professional Edition v1.1.0
• 3DMark11 Professional Edition v1.0.132.0
• 3DMark 2013 Professional Edition v1.2.362
• AIDA64 Extreme Edition v3.00.2536 Beta
• Cinebench R11.529 64-bit
• SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP
• MaxxMEM² - PreView v2.01
• Sisoft Sandra 2014.SP3 20.28
• Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark v1.0.0.0
• wPRIME version v2.10
• X3: Terran Conflict Demo v1.0

That is about all you need to know methodology wise, so let's get to the good stuff!

 

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Feature Testing: SATA Express Results

Feature Testing: SATA Express Results

Back in April, in our ASUS 9-Series Preview article, we mentioned that there were basically zero SATA Express devices ready to hit the market any time soon. Regrettably, the same seems to hold true today. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to see what this new high-speed interface is capable of.

Thankfully for us, ASUS has ASMedia - storage controller experts - as one of its subsidiaries and they were able to whip together a pretty neat storage device in the form of the Hyper Express enclosure. As you might have guessed, the Hyper Express utilizes the new SATA Express interface.

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There will be at least three variants of the Hyper Express, but it is basically a 2.5" or 3.5" enclosure that houses either two mSATA or two M.2 solid state drives, or two 2.5" SSDs (or even HDDs) and automatically sets them up to run in RAID-0. As a result, if you choose some sufficiently fast SSDs, you can likely end up with a high-performance storage solution that hits the 10Gb/s SATA Express bandwidth limit. This "first wave" device uses an ASMedia 1062R SATA 6Gb/s RAID controller and it does not currently support the TRIM command, which is obviously a pretty serious con unless you have SSDs with excellent internal garbage collection algorithms. Hopefully this is an issue that they can fix before it ever officially launches.

The unit that ASUS provided us came packed with two Kingston SSDNow mS200 120GB mSATA solid state drives. These are based on the LSI SandForce SF-2241 controller and are rated at an impressive 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write speeds. Now this is not a review of this device, since this is still a pre-production product and you will not be able to buy one pre-assembled with SSDs inside. We just want to show you a little bit of what SATA Express is capable of.

As you have probably know, most current SATA 6Gb/s devices struggle to get anywhere near the theoretical 750MB/s limit. Due to overhead you are realistically looking at real-life transfer rates of up to about 550 to 575MB/s. Eventually we will see SATA Express 16Gb/s implementations capable of supporting transfer rates of up to 2GB/s, but at the moment all 9-series chipsets seem to be limited to a 10GB/s interface that is limited to about 1GB/s of bandwidth.

With all of this in mind, let's take a peak at the results.

SATA 3 vs. SATA Express - Click on image to enlarge​

As you can see above, a modern solid state drive is capable of about 535-550MB/s. Often this is not a controller limitation, but an interface one. If you were to combine one of these modern SATA controllers with a faster interface, the results would be way above SATA 3's limits. That is what SATA-Express is promising to do. Not only do you get up to 1GB/s of bandwidth but there is a built-in backward compatibility with current SATA devices.

With the Hyper Express enclosure, we were able to get very close to the 750MB/s mark. Now admittedly this is the best result that we were able to accomplish across a variety of benchmarks. Realistically it should perform even better, but the Hyper Express is not ready for prime time. It does however give us a glimpse at what we can expect from future SATA Express devices. There is no doubt that within 3-4 months there will be devices that are fully capable of utilizing this interface's 1GB/s of bandwidth.

 

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Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Since fewer and fewer consumers seem to be buying discrete sound cards, the quality of a motherboard's onboard audio is now more important than ever. We figured that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at just how good the analog signal quality is on this new X99-Deluxe and compare it to two ASUS Z97 motherboards that we have recently reviewed. We are going to do this using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, since sound quality isn't really something that can be adequately explained with only numbers. To do this we have turned to the RightMark Audio Analyzer, basically the standard application for this type of testing. Since all the three motherboards support very high quality 24-bit, 192kHz audio playback we selected that as the sample mode option. Basically, what this test does is pipe the audio signal from the front-channel output to the line-in input via a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male mini-plug cable, and then RightMark does the audio analysis.

As always, we used a mix of Grado SR225i and Koss PortaPro headphones, Westone UM1 IEMs, and Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speakers for our extensive listening period, and we are happy to report that the sound quality was above reproach. As we have mentioned in the past, at this high level there was no discernible difference in output quality between the three motherboards. Now we aren't experts in this area, but we again suspect that your average user will likewise be perfectly content with this motherboard's onboard audio capabilities.

 

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Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

It wouldn't be an HWC review if we didn't include some overclocking results, so we thoroughly tested out this motherboard's capabilities, especially its auto-overclocking functionality. Though it features a new chipset, the X99 Deluxe is still fundamentally an LGA2011 motherboard, and as a result there is nothing new to report on how to overclock on this motherboard, but if you want any insights check out the overclocking section in our review of the Core i7-5960X.

Auto Overclocking

The X99 Deluxe features two types of automatic overclocking. Within the UEFI BIOS you can find the OC Tuner feature. This automatic overclocking method features two main options, a multiplier-only tuning mode or a multiplier and BCLK tuning mode. Although it is very fast - the time it takes to save & exit the BIOS - OC Tuner is based on presets and as such it produces much less impressive results than an intelligent software-based approach. Thankfully, one is included. Within the Ai Suite III utility there is the usual TPU automatic overclocking feature that is part of the new 5-Way Optimization scheme. This method features two options (Fast Tuning & Extreme Tuning) as well as two different methods for achieving that overclocking (Ratio Only & BCLK First). This is an intelligent auto OC feature though, it does not rely on presets. As a result, it will slowly increase your processor's clock speed and voltage, test for stability, and repeat until it has found the sweet spot. In this new version of the software, you can specify a clock speed to start from and even what maximum temperature you feel comfortable with.

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First up, we have the Ratio Tuning multiplier-only tuning mode. Its application was extremely quick - the time it takes to save & exit the BIOS - and it produced decent enough results. This preset increased the CPU multipliers to 39X across all the cores, resulting in a static 3.9GHz clock speed. It's nothing too special, but it is a solid increase over the i7-5960X's stock 3.0Ghz to 3.5Ghz range. Although it is a fairly moderate overclock, the core voltage increase is thankfully quite reasonable as well.

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The second OC Tuner mode utilizes both the CPU multiplier and the BCLK to achieve its overclock. In our case, our i7-5960X was pushed to 3.85Ghz - 50Mhz less than the multiplier-only mode - but with an almost 400Mhz Uncore/Cache overclock and it also set our memory modules to a solid DDR4-2666. As you will see our benchmarks section, even with these two improvements the performance different between both modes should be miniscule.

Overall, given how quick and easy it is to engage OC Tuner, consider us impressed with its current implementation. However, obviously we want even better results, and that is were the software-based TPU approach comes into play. Let's see what it can do.

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Once again, we are impressed with the capabilities of the TurboV Processing Unit (TPU) and the 5-Way Optimization feature. This second auto-overclocking feature is software-based, and it does not utilize presets. As a result, it does take quite a bit longer (5-20 minutes) and requires a few automatic system reboots. Within Windows, the TPU slowly increases the system frequencies and does some stress testing at each level until it finds the limit, BSODs, reboots, and voila! The overclock is set.

4.4Ghz at 1.290V is actually shockingly close to what we were able to manually achieve in our Core i7-5690X review, which is to say 4.4Ghz at 1.300V. The machine is getting to be as good as the man, more so than we have ever seen before. The fact that it didn't touch either the Uncore/Cache or the memory frequency is obviously a bit disappointing, but nevertheless this is an impressive result.

Manual Overclocking

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Since we knew that we did not have a lot of headroom above 4.4Ghz @ 1.30V available to us - at least not without a serious vCore increase and the accompanying heat output - we focused on increasing the Uncore/Cache and the memory frequency. As you can see, that proved quite succesful on this motherboard, and it was easy too. First and foremost, we enabled the XMP profile that was programmed into our 16GB G.Skill RipJaws 4 DDR4-3000 15-15-15-35 kit. That set a 3.5Ghz CPU core clock (28x125Mhz), 3000Mhz Uncore, and DDR4-3000 memory frequency. From there, it was only a matter slowly upping the BCLK and adjusting the system voltages as needed. We achieved a 4.29Ghz Uncore by increasing the cache voltage to 1.35V and the system agent voltage to 1.20V. We kept the memory modules at their manufacturer specified 1.35V and stock timings, but we were able to push them to DDR3-3118, with more to come in our upcoming review. To get all of this stable, we did need to increase the core voltage by an additional 0.05V, which was not unexpected since we were pushing so many different parts of the processor way out of spec.

Overall, overclocking on this motherbard was a breeze and a pleasure. The automatic overclocking results speak for themselves - which is to say from solid to amazing - and the motherboard didn't stand in our way when we tried to push the Uncore and memory frequency to new heights (for us). You can't ask for better than that.

 

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System Benchmarks

System Benchmarks

In the System and Gaming Benchmarks sections, we reveal the results from a number of benchmarks run with the Core i7-5960X and ASUS X99 Deluxe at default clocks, with the TPU Extreme Tuning preset applied, and using own our manual overclock. This will illustrate how much performance can be achieved with this motherboard in stock and overclocked form. For a thorough comparison of the Core i7-5960X versus a number of different CPUs have a look at our Intel Haswell-E Core i7-5960X Review.

SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. We are running one instance of SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP. This is therefore a single-thread workload.

wPRIME 2.10

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. This is a highly multi-threaded workload.

Cinebench R11.5

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit
Test1: CPU Image Render
Comparison: Generated Score

The latest benchmark from MAXON, Cinebench R11.5 makes use of all your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene using various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. This particular benchmarking can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Sandra Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media Benchmarks

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. The software suite provides most of the information (including undocumented) users like to know about hardware, software, and other devices whether hardware or software. The name “Sandra” is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means "defender", "helper of mankind".

The software version used for these tests is SiSoftware Sandra 2013 SP4. In the 2012 version of Sandra, SiSoft has updated the .Net benchmarks and the GPGPU benchmarks have been upgraded to General Processing (GP) benchmarks, able to fully test the new APU (CPU+GPU) processors. The two benchmarks that we used are the Processor Multi-Media and Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These three benchmarks were chosen as they provide a good indication of three varying types of system performance. The multi-media test shows how the processor handles multi-media instructions and data and the arithmetic test shows how the processor handles arithmetic and floating point instructions. These two tests illustrate two important areas of a computer’s speed and provide a wide scope of results.

MaxxMem Benchmark

Created by MaxxPI², the MaxxMem benchmark tests your computer’s raw memory performance, combining copy, read, write and latency tests into one global score. This memory benchmark is a classic way to measure bandwidth of a memory subsystem.

MaxxMem uses continuous memoryblocks, sized in power of 2 from 16MB up to 512MB, starting either writing to or reading from it. To enable high-precision memory performance measurement, they both internally work with multiple passes and averages calculations per run.

Further, the main goal was to minimize (CPU) cache pollution on memory reads and to eliminate it (almost completely) on memory writes. Additionally, MaxxMem operates with an aggressive data prefetching algorithm. This all will deliver an excellent judge of bandwidth while reading and writing.

 

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Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark v1.1.0
Graphic Settings: Fire Strike Preset
Rendered Resolution: 1920x1680
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark is the brand new cross-platform benchmark from the gurus over at Futuremark. Designed to test a full range of hardware from smartphones to high-end PCs, it includes three tests for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 hardware, and allows users to compare 3DMark scores with other Windows, Android and iOS devices. Most important to us is the new Fire Strike preset, a DirectX 11 showcase that tests tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Like every new 3DMark version, this test is extremely GPU-bound, but it does contain a heavy physics test that can show off the potential of modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

3DMark 11 v1.0.5
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x720
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark 11 is Futuremark's very latest benchmark, designed to tests all of the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. At the moment, it is lot more GPU-bound than past versions are now, but it does contain a terrific physics test which really taxes modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage v1.1.2
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x1024

Test: Specific CPU Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score

3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses DirectX 10 exclusively so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about this benchmark. Along with being a very capable graphics card testing application, it also has very heavily multi-threaded CPU tests, such Physics Simulation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes it a good all-around gaming benchmark.

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark
Resolution: 1680x1050
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Graphic Settings: High
Comparison: Particle Performance Metric

Originally intended to demonstrate new processing effects added to Half Life 2: Episode 2 and future projects, the particle benchmark condenses what can be found throughout HL2:EP2 and combines it all into one small but deadly package. This test does not symbolize the performance scale for just Episode Two exclusively, but also for many other games and applications that utilize multi-core processing and particle effects. As you will see the benchmark does not score in FPS but rather in its own "Particle Performance Metric", which is useful for direct CPU comparisons.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict 1.2.0.0
Resolution: 1680x1050
Texture & Shader Quality: High
Antialiasing 4X
Anisotropic Mode: 8X
Glow Enabled

Game Benchmark
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC) is the culmination of the X-series of space trading and combat simulator computer games from German developer Egosoft. With its vast space worlds, intricately detailed ships, and excellent multi-threaded game engine, it remains a great test of modern CPU performance.

 

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Voltages / Temps / Power Consumption

Voltage Regulation

Usually we have a pretty extensive voltage regulation section, but this time we were a little wary of poking and prodding the live VRM section of a motherboard powering a brand new $1000 processor that we need for half a dozen other reviews. We usually throw caution to the wind, but this time there's just too much on the table to risk a worse case scenario type event. Therefore, in this abbreviated outlook, we can tell you that - based on the Ai Suite's voltage readings - this motherboard appears to have excellent regulation output. What you set in the bios seems to be exactly what the board put outs, without fault. This is likely due to the fact that it appears that there is some type of Load-Line Calibration (LLC) enabled by default once you set the Ai Overclock Tuner to Manual.

At this point, we would usually see how the vCore behaves with and without Load-Line Calibration (LLC) enabled. However, OCCT did not recognize this motherboard's vCore line, and thus could not actually monitor anything. We had to look for an alternative, and settled on the AIDA64 System Stability Test. This testing was done with a one-hour stability run and with our Core i7-5960X overclocked to 4.2Ghz at 1.30V (in the BIOS).

This only illustrates a portion of the 60 minute run, but we watched attentively throughout and there were never any spikes. The vCore line was straight as an arrow for the full hour and it never deviated from 1.300V. You can't really ask for better than that.


Temperature Testing

We haven't done any motherboard temperature testing in a while, simply because there was frankly no reason to. However, on this LGA2011-v3 platform with its power hungry octo-core processors, it is worthwhile to check how hot the MOSFETs and other components are running when the system is overclocked. For this test, we configured our manual overclock and then ran HyperPi 0.99b in 16-thread mode as well as 3DMark (2013) at the same time for 30 minutes. Temperatures were recorded with our thermal probe, which was actually put in direct contact with the chipset as well as one of the MOSFET ICs. The ambient temperature was 21°C/70°F.

Even with a GeForce GTX 780 Ti blasting heat on it, the X99 PCH never really heated up much. In fact, it ran downright cool no matter what we did, including transferring hundreds of gigabytes from one hard drive to another. At stocks settings, the VRM's heat output was quite reasonable, even without any active cooling whatsoever. When ran the system overclocked, the temps did jump up quite a bit, but that is not unexpected since we were running at 4.3Ghz with 1.35V. Some of that heat was heat was even probably being radiated from the CPU cooler. We were dealing with an open test bench without any auxiliary fans, but in a proper case with some decent airflow the VRM temps shouldn't be a cause for concern.


Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the BIOS and the Windows power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter. For our CPU load test, we ran HyperPi 0.99b on all available threads until completion, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter. For our overall system load test, we ran HyperPi 0.99b on all available threads while simultaneously loading the GPU with 3DMark (2013).

The stock numbers are very much inline we what would expect from a fully featured motherboard such as this one. We aren't using any of the numerous power saving software options that ASUS offers, so there's definitely room for improvement if that's of interest to you. Once you start pumping extra voltage into that octo-core processor the power consumption starts shooting up pretty quickly, but this motherboard proved more than capable of handling the additional load.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

What we once said about the X79 platform now holds true for the X99 platform: If you have the money to afford it, and the skills to make use of it, this is the best platform on the market. Although the ASUS X99-Deluxe is the first LGA2011-v3 motherboard that we have reviewed, what a start! This thing has captured our imagination since Day One. From the 'I, Robot' aesthetics, to the surprising accessories bundle, to the all-encompassing connectivity options, the Deluxe definitely lives up to its name.

In case you skipped straight to the conclusion, let's recap some of the hard specs: five physical PCI-E x16 slots, 3-way CrossFire and 3-way SLI capabilities, one PCI-E x4 slot, one onboard M.2 x4 connector and an M.2 x4 PCI-E expansion card, two SATA Express ports, eight SATA 6Gb/s port (plus the four on the SATAe ports), ten USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0/3.0 headers, two Intel-powered Gigabit LAN ports, Thunderbolt 2.0 header, a dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi module with Bluetooth v4.0 and included 3T3R antenna, a three-way fan extension card with thermal probe capabilities, Realtek ALC1150 eight-channel audio codec with DTS Connect, onboard buttons and switches, LED display, and cool lighting effects. What is most impressive is that ASUS have fit all of this onto a standard ATX form factor and they have done it all while avoiding any show stopping clearance/installation issues.

We can't really speak to the performance of this motherboard - since it's our first - but a little internet sleuthing tells us that it's right where it should be. Given the aggressive way that ASUS has been outputting new BIOSes lately, if there are any performance deficiencies we have no doubts that they will be fixed in a hurry. Likewise with their software utilities, which have gotten as sleek and capable as ever, and are also updated on the regular.

As we revealed in the Overclocking Results section, this motherboard has some fantastic automatic overclocking capabilities. The two auto-overclocking options, one in the BIOS and one software-based, differ greatly in their approaches but we can appreciate their distinct purposes. Most importantly though, our results and experiences indicate that they both work exceedingly well. The more advanced TPU automatic implementation pushed our i7-5960X up to 4.4GHz at 1.29V, which was within a hair of our own manual overclock. So either we've lost our touch or ASUS' auto-overclocking implementation has gotten exceedingly good.

Speaking of our manual overclock, although we have already hit a frequency/voltage/heat wall at about 4.4Ghz and 1.30V, the X99-Deluxe proved quite adept when we tried to push the Uncore and memory frequency to impressive new heights. We managed to overclock the Uncore from its stock 3000Mhz up to 4288Mhz, an impressive 43% increase. Likewise, we were able to extract an additional 59Mhz from our top-notch G.Skill DDR4-3000 memory kit, reaching DDR4-3118 15-15-15-35 without loosening any timings or increasing the voltage above the specified 1.35V. Basically, this motherboard proved to be an ally during our overclocking endeavours, not a foe, and that's as good as you can hope for.

$400USD/$420CAD is still a lot of money for a motherboard - though it pales in comparison to the price of a Core i7-5690X and many DDR4 memory kits - but this is the type of motherboard that you can build a high-end system around and never have the sense that you're missing out on anything or going to run out of anything. There are absolutely no compromises here, no flaws at all really, so it is an easy product for us to give a vigorous thumbs up to.