Final Thoughts
This is the first motherboard that I have reviewed from EVGA and our first X99 motherboard as well. Most people mainly know EVGA for their graphics card offerings, but they have been making motherboards for some time now too. It is quite interesting to see an X99 Micro-ATX motherboard from EVGA, the only other company that has X99 Micro-ATX offerings is ASRock. This does give EVGA an advantage as more people will be looking at this board if they want the new X99 platform on a smaller board.
Being that both the Intel Core i7-5960X and Core i7-5930K have 40 PCI-Express lanes having a smaller motherboard means that you will not be able to take full advantage of all of those lanes, but that is ok. EVGA has equipped this motherboard with two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots and a third PCI-Express 3.0 x8 slot. While you could technically do three graphics cards there is not enough room between the two bottom slots for a dual-slot card so most people will do two dual-slot graphics cards and use the last slot for a sound card or something similar. You will be able to run those two graphics cards at x16 speeds.
One of the biggest reasons to move to the X99 chipset is the power of the new Haswell-E processors. Having 8-core and 6-core processors makes X99 chipset and Haswell-E perfect for content creation and applications that make full use of all the cores / threads. Of course you can push this processor even further as well. I was able to achieve a 1.4 GHz overclock on my Intel Core i7-5960X bringing it up to 4.4 GHz. Being that this is a brand new platform overclocking will mature with new BIOS releases so expect even better overclocking results in the future.
I really do like EVGA’s UEFI BIOS. It is extremely easy to use, even for a beginner. I was able to find everything without any issues and it didn’t hang or freeze once. I would have liked to have seen a favorites menu though. That makes it easy to organize all of the settings you use the most in one place.
This is the first consumer platform that gives you DDR4 support so that is another plus to move over to the platform. EVGA has also added power, reset, and clear CMOS buttons to the motherboard, voltage check points, and the debug LED gives you a live readout of the CPU temperature.
There were a couple of things I was a little disappointed with on this motherboard. The first is that the M.2 slot only has room for 2230 length M.2 devices. ASRock was able to fit room for larger M.2 devices on their Micro-ATX X99 motherboards so I would have liked to have seen that support here. This board also lacks a high-end audio solution which is pretty much common on other motherboards.
Overall this is a great entry for EVGA into the X99 chipset segment and one of three X99 motherboards that are currently available right now. Overall ThinkComputers gives the EVGA X99 Micro Motherboard an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– One of only three Micro-ATX X99 Motherboards available (at time of review)
– Room for two dual-slot graphics cards
– Voltage checkpoints
– Sleek and easy to use BIOS
– Power and reset buttons on board
Cons:
– Only smaller M.2 slot
– Pretty horrible companion software
– No high-end audio solution
