Asus X99-A II Review

Test Setup

We use the same hardware to test all LGA2011-v3 motherboards. Due to the GPU-limited nature of many of today's games, we now use two AMD R9 290 graphics cards to allow CPU performance to come into play, especially once the chip is overclocked. AMD and XFX graciously provided two of their R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition graphics cards, and the large coolers should prevent the GPUs from throttling when under load.


As many LGA2011-v3 systems will sport multiple GPUs, this is also a representative system given the extra PCI-E lanes provided by Haswell-E CPUs over their LGA1150 counterparts. As such, we also use Intel's Core i7-5960X, which has the full complement of PCI-E lanes available to run both GPUs at x16 speed.

Test System

• CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X
  
• Memory: 4 x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2,666MHz DDR4
  
• Graphics cards: 2 x XFX Radeon R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition
  
• PSU: Corsair AX860i
  
• SSD: Crucial MX100 512GB, Samsung SSD 850 Pro 256GB (SATA 6Gbps speed tests)
  
• CPU cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H80i GT
  
• Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit

Thanks to Corsair for supplying the PSU, memory and CPU cooler, to Crucial and Samsung for the SSDs, to Intel for the CPU and to XFX for the graphics cards.

Tests:

• PCMark 8 Video 4K encoding
  
• PCMark 8 Photo Editing
  
• Cinebench R15
  
• Terragen 3
  
• Bioshock Infinite
  
• Battlefield 4
  
• SATA 6Gbps
  
• Rightmark Audio Analyser
  
• Power consumption