ASUS X99-A Motherboard Review

ASUS X99-A Overview
The ASUS X99-A is an ATX motherboard and as I mention sits at the bottom of ASUS’s X99 motherboard stack. It is below ASUS’s X99-E, X99-Deluxe and X99-Pro boards in their “regular” line of X99 motherboards. All of these boards feature the same color scheme which is an all black PCB with white and grey accents. The black on the motherboard is a nice matte black that just looks great!

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

Let’s start at the CPU socket, which is the LGA2011v3 socket that supports Intel’s Haswell-E processors. This is not just any ordinary LGA2011v3 socket, but it is ASUS’s own patent pending OC socket. It includes extra pins to improve overclocking on both the CPU and memory. Flanking the CPU socket you will find 8 DDR4 DIMM slots (4 on each side). These slots are color-coded for quad channel operation and they do not have locking ends on the bottom. This makes it easy to install and remove memory if you have a graphics card installed. The board features an 8+4 phase DIGI+ VRM design. You can see the two large heatsinks that keep your power delivery components nice and cool.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

Behind one of the heatsinks you will find the 8pin EPS connector that will power your CPU. There are also two 4pin fan connectors, one for your CPU fan and a second optional CPU fan connector.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

Moving over to the side of the board at the top corner is the MemOK button. If you are having trouble booting your system because of a memory issue pressing this button will allow the system to find the correct timings to get your system to boot. Moving down you have the 24pin ATX power connector, a 4pin fan connector, two SATA 6GB/s ports and a USB 3.0 header.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

Going down the board we find the rest of the storage connections. There is a single SATA Express port and six more SATA 6GB/s ports. You might be wondering why the SATA ports are color-coded black and grey, well the black ports do not support Intel RST and the grey ones do. So the grey ports will support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. Also if you happen to not want to use the SATA Express port the two SATA ports there become available to use.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

Right below the PCH heatsink there is an 32Gb/s M.2 x4 slot. It will support M.2 solid state drives up to 110 mm in length. Right below the M.2 slot is another 4pin fan connector, TPU switch, EPU switch, and EZ XMP switch. These three switches allow you to change functionality of the motherboard without entering the BIOS. The TPU switch has three positions: all the way to the left will disable turbo boost frequency, in the middle it will enable the turbo boost frequency and when it in the right it will enable BCLK and multiplier adjustments. The EPU switch enables energy saving mode and the EZ XMP profile switch will enable the XMP profile on your installed memory.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

At the bottom of the board you will find the rest of your buttons, connections and headers. From right to left you have your front panel connections, two USB 2.0 headers, a USB 3.0 header, TPM header, debug LED, reset switch, power switch, COM port, external fan header, and HD audio header.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

On the far side of the board you will find ASUS’s Crystal Sound 2 audio solution. You can see the Nichicon audio capacitors, but the solution also features an EMI protection cover and PCB isolation.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

When it comes to expansion slots on the board it will really depend on the processor you have, you are either going to get 28 or 40 PCI-Express lanes. There are three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, a single PCI-Express 2.0 x16, and two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots. If you happen to have 40 PCI-Express lanes the slots will work as follows: x16, x16/x16, x16/x16/x8. That goes down to x16, x16/x8, x16/x8/x4 when you have 28 PCI-Express lanes. There are also two more 4pin fan connectors above the top PCI-Express slot, giving you a total of six if you are counting the CPU fan connector.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

Finally on to the rear I/O there is a BIOS flashback button, PS/2 combination port, four USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, an Intel-powered Gigabit Ethernet port and your audio connections.

ASUS X99-A Motherboard

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