Asus X99-Pro Review

Performance Analysis

The X99 Pro posted some of the fastest results we've seen in the PC Mark 8 benchmarks and was equally rapid in in Terragen 3 and Cinebench R15 where it was in the top three in both tests. As we needed to tweak things to get the CPU working at full speed at stock, we weren't surprised to see the X99-Pro post some fairly high power numbers too - the same was true of the X99 Deluxe. You can obviously plumb all the manual settings in yourself and likely get lower power consumption, but our stock speed test is an out-of-the-box configuration where as a maximum we load the XMP profile and set the correct memory settings.


The overclock, though, was spectacular and this board will push any cooling solution to its limits. 4.35GHz is the fastest overclock we've managed so far on our Core i7-5960X, although this did see the load power consumption rise from 328W to 455W - this was still lower than both the ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer and Asus X99 Deluxe posted with lower overclocks. Despite a 50MHz clock speed advantage, this didn't result in the fastest speeds on test, with the exception of Terragen 3, where the X99-Pro now holds the lowest time. Elsewhere it was very fast but no chart-toppingly so.


There was nothing bad to report storage-wise, although the read speed of the M.2 SSD was a little low. Our audio test proved that the X99-Pro lives up to expectations following Asus's hype about the on board sound and performance here was almost identical to the X99 Deluxe too. Only the ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer was any better, with the three proving to be head and shoulders above MSI and Gigabyte's offerings that we've looked at so far.

Conclusion

The Asus X99-Pro is fast out of the box and equally rapid once overclocked. It's also the best board we've seen so far on X99 for tweakers out there and would be very suited to a custom liquid cooled PC. That said, overclocking it was also remarkably easy but that's to Asus's credit. As it stands, if you want to push your LGA2011-v3 CPU to the limit, the X99-Pro won't disappoint.

The good news doesn't end there though. You get on board WiFi, a 4x PCI-E M.2 adaptor, WiFi aerial plus excellent on board audio too. There are plenty of overclocking tools in addition to a slick and good-looking PCB that also sports double-spaced slots for two-way GPU setups. You really couldn't want for a lot more, although this does mean you'll be paying a small premium over your typical £180-200 X99 board for the privilege.