Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
The ASRock X99X is a lovely motherboard to own. It offers a wide range of features, is a reasonably good overclocker (depend a lot on your CPU and cooling) and comes with interesting looks. I say interesting as I find the color scheme to use too much red, a little more black would have been my preference. No other than that it is a little beast armed with some really quality components, good audio, two Gigabit jacks, ten SATA ports and of course you have to like the M.2. slot which has a x4 PCIe link allowance of 32 Gbit/sec.
Add to that the RAW horsepower a Haswell-E platform delivers with the 6 and 8-core processor and DDR4 memory. Yeah, it’s cool stuff alright. Specs and features wise there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be an excellent infrastructure for your 2/3-way SLI or Crossfire build. The amount of USB 3.0 ports are plentiful as well, and of course we need to mention the enhanced audio solution as well. Interesting to see is the preamp stuff for external DACs. I really do have to complement the audio features here, as over the standard Realtek codec used like two years ago, we now see huge improvement on both hard and software side that is way more appealing to the audiophile.
The Platform Experience
The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the motherboard manufacturers did and now are offering. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice but is at the level of pretty much any previous Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.5 GHz per core for the Core i7 5960X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E will make nice difference. Added to that, quad-channel DDR4 memory will offer retarded bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes and you'll have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus. With this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great lengths and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really. The latest iteration of the uEFI interface finally has become mature and I've actually started to really like it. Apply a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4200~4500 MHz range with a 5960X fairly easily though.
Storage
Combined with ten SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly complain about anything. Pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 700/800 Mb/sec range. Overall your SATA and M.2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance. Great to see is that the slot has obtained a x4 PCIe interface connection allowing it 32 Gbps of bandwidth to work in. To compare a little, your preferred SSD SATA3 port has 6 Gbps available ;) So that small form factor SSD solution now is very future proof.
Tweaking
If you have two left hands in terms of overclocking then fire up the UEFI BIOS and you can select pre configured overclock modes up-to 4.5 GHz, power up and after a few seconds your motherboard will all of the sudden be mildly overclocked. Unfortunately that feature did not work for us as we have a very voltage hungry processor, so we had to overclock manually. Overall though, the tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what we expected. Realistically at 1.30~1.35 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 5960X at roughly 4400 MHz on all cores. We need to apply a hefty 1.40 Volts for that. And even though that seems high, it remains to be 4400 MHz on 8 physical CPU cores, the performance is huge. Others have been able to reach 4.5 GHz on all 8-cores with just a 1.25v Vcore. Some CPUs clock great on low voltages, other behave like a pig, in our case where we needed ~1.40 Volts to reach 4.4 GHz and yes, we have gotten the pig processor. Regardless, overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with as the OC Formula certainly isn't the limiting factor. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, on the contrary this board was designed to offer all the features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise. This X99X Killer much like the Forumula we tested would not work with XMP higher than 2400 MHz. Basically at 2667 or higher you need a 125MHz bus and that causes problems for a lot of motherboards actually. We left it at JEDEC 2133 MHz and XMP 2400 worked flawless as well.
Final Words
In the 225 EURO / 279 USD bracket you can purchase the motherboard as reviewed today. For that money you get to have a well designed and feature rich product with ten SATA 6 Gbps ports, two Gigabit NIC jacks and 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec, covered by an EMI shield. The part of the PCB where the audio hardware is located is isolated to prevent interference. The motherboard is multi-GPU up-to 2/3 way SLI/Crossfire ready. In this price-range we expected to see some sort of WIFI included though, that is a bit of a nag for me personally. Other than that a Haswell-E processor platform offers more though, multi-GPU support, USB 3.0, SATA3, PCI-E Gen 3.0, ease of tweaking and sure, the design and component selection. We think the ASRock X99X Killer is just that, a killer product. It has a nice feature-set, overclocks (if your CPU allows it) pretty well and easily and is embedded with a nice audio solution. Worthy of our recommended award.
Check our other Haswell-E reviews:
Handy related downloads:
- Sign up to receive a notice when we publish a new article
- Or go back to Guru3D's front page.
“Remember what you are and what you are not”
