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ASUS X99-A (LGA 2011-3) Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The ASUS X99-A motherboard is available in the US from NewEgg at $254.99 and in the UK from Overclockers UK for a modest price of £199.99. This pricing is a little under the average price for the X99 series only being pipped by some discount motherboards and the mATX range.

Summary

I received this motherboard with great expectations in mind. It has features hanging out of the box, oodles of extras and stickers to really big up the motherboard. Despite all of that, it feels as though this is more of a budget aimed board, as budget as a X99 motherboard can be; possibly more aimed towards a 5930k user.

I like how this motherboard is very understated, very workstation like. Those white details on the heat sinks really give this a professional, ‘I mean business’ look. I love all the features this motherboard has, power saving, RAM overclocking and fan adjustment to name a few. Now ASUS Turbo LAN, that’s something to talk about; a HUGE increase there, something I wouldn’t have thought would work. Along with Turbo LAN, ASUS 5 Way Optimisation works a treat. It holds the CPU overclock back slightly, but to only 4.2GHz; simply awesome for a one click job.

Through all my testing, I didn’t find a single thing wrong. Okay after a trip into the BIOS it had to reset twice, the BIOS was a little choppy with the mouse (it still worked), but that was it. Those were not really problems, just little niggles which are 9/10 times associated with external hardware; in my case most likely my mouse.

My recommend section, woop. The only thing I want to recommend is the EZ BIOS, make it even ‘EZ-er’. Tabulate if you have to, all that information can be scary for a novice; heck I was a little scared when I saw all that RAM information on a simplified screen.

Pros