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

BIOS and Overclocking

So the past few years have seen ASUS change their UEFI BIOS a fair few times, from adjusting the legacy style BIOS to adding a whole new ‘EZ mode’. The X99-A is equipped with the latest EZ mode BIOS, although at first glance; it doesn’t look all that ‘EZ’. I found my mouse (R.A.T. 7) was choppy at best and didn’t react on every click. I think ASUS should improve mouse response and tab off each section. Why have ‘EZ System Tuning’ and ‘EZ Tuning Wizard’ on the same page?, why a graph for CPU temp and digits for motherboard?. Why display the inactive DIMM’s and fans? If the system knows they are N/A, then a simple tweak could just turn them off? I do like the simple drag and drop Boot Priority.

Now all the information was on that page, however ASUS EZ Tuning Wizard opens up a new window and goes step by step through an automatic overclocking process. Before it sets any changes, it gives the user an estimated result; could be good if you can only achieve a small overclock, but this process overclocks higher.

Apart from the EZ mode, ASUS as kindly included the more advanced, legacy style BIOS. More spread out, but at the same time, less complicated as everything on each page only relates to that single item.

Within the tool section, we have the usual ASUS suspects from GPU Post to EZ Flash. I personally like the GPU Post section. When entered, it tells the user what PCIe slot the GPU is plugged into, what speed and the recommended configuration for 2-3 GPU configurations.

The best feature of this motherboard (in my opinion) is the ‘My Favourites’ section. This allows you to pick and swap certain aspects from the whole of the advanced section and lay it all on a single page. This could be particularly handy to swap out of just memory overclock information, or boot information; saves you going through a multitude of information just to find one result.

Overclocking

Our i7-5960X can achieve an overclock of 4.4GHz, which this motherboard does with ease. It then crashes at 4.5GHz without voltage tweaks.