Gadgetory

the defined iOS is quiet compact and it's built for mini ITX water-cooled systems just like this one but watch out if you get one Josh might just show up for your house randomly fractal design to find Nano as is small quiet and built for mini ITX water-cooled systems just like this one but if you get one watch out because frankly josh might just show up at any minute you know Kyle's full of oh well I was in our soup and pulse still Nigeria we've been here for like an hour dudes get the hell outta here excellent what's up guys welcome back here's my long-awaited review of the Asus x99 deluxe 2 motherboard Asus recently refreshed their x99 lineup to correspond with the launch of Intel's new enthusiast CPUs the Broadwell II ones that launched back at the beginning of June 2016 you can check out my 69 50 X benchmarks if you have a card right up there older but still very powerful haswell-e CPUs are also supported of course as the sport continues to use the LGA 2011 - 3 sockets and x99 chipset round things out with a redesigned black white and grey color scheme throwing some optional RGB lighting at a generous stack of accessories in the box and the $420 price tag starts to sound almost reasonable so clearly at $420 this is a high-end board and since the CPUs that work with it start at around $400 themselves it is safe to say that this board is for enthusiasts who are looking for more than just a gaming rig that price does at least get you tons of accessories which was my complaint actually with the Maximus 8 formula from Asus that I reviewed a few months back card up in the corner which also had a premium price tag but I felt was short on add-ons with the x99 deluxe - you get a two black-and-whites SATA cables half of them with 90 degree angled connectors on one end an RGB LED extension cable just one ribbon style 2-way or 3-way SLI bridge not the prettiest in my opinion and would like to have seen a basic 2-way bridge as well or maybe one of those black ROG ones there's also a Thunderbolt cable to connect the Thunderbolt cards to the Thunderbolt header on the motherboard a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable for writing your GPUs video out into the Thunderbolt card can then be fed back out through the USB type-c port a silver and blue IO shield with squishy ESD backing a stack of documentation for the fan extension card the hyper m2 card Quick Start Guide optical driver and software CDs I guess people still use these maybe as well as booklets for the Thunderbolt II x3 card and the actual motherboard itself but wait there's more a couple small kits for CPU installation and vertical m2 card installation three temperature sensor cables with diodes you can place wherever you want in your system a magnetic base antenna for the built-in dual band 802 dot eleven AC Wi-Fi if an extension cables connect the fan extension card q connector for more easily connecting front panel leads screws formatting m dot two and fan extension cards the hyper M two by four mini card for adding another m2 slot to your system on top of the built-in one the thunderbolt the x3 card which gives you a really nice add-on and Thunderbolt connectivity bi-directional connection speeds up to 40 gigabits per second as well as two additional USB 3.1 ports and type a and type C trim finally the fan extension card that allows you to connect three more fans for a maximum of nine two CPU fans and seven case fans each with independent control from either the UEFI bios or the AI suite 3 software wow that's a lot of accessories what about the motherboard itself though the Asus x99 deluxe 2 is heavy first of all which is usually an indicator of good build quality and higher bill of materials cost for example uses integrated some massive vrm heat sinks and a dense multi-layer PCB with a clean matte black finish speaking of the finish black white and grey or silver is the color scheme here with just the slightest hint of blue on some of the flair pieces and heatsink covers for memory support you have eight DIMM slots for quad channel ddr4 up to 16 gigs per dim slot for up to 128 gigs total at asu's is validated kits going up to 33 33 speed this is continuing to use their OC socket design which has extra pins in the 2011 - 3 socket which they say helps combat voltage drop for more stable overclocking the PCIe slot uses the new safe slot steel-reinforced implementation which JJ told me last month integrates into the mother word PCB for increased sturdiness less flex with heavy GPUs installed there's five full-length PCI Express by 16 slots and one by one slot but bear in mind that the second full-length slot the one without the steel reinforcement or the led on the retention mechanism is a Gentoo by for connection x99 deluxe to officially supports 3-way SLI or crossfire configurations if you're using a 40 PCIe line CPU like a 69 50 X or 59 30 K incidentally in my build here I am using a 59 30 K even with a 40 PCIe Lane CPU there are still some connectivity limitations since there is no PL X which to provide more lanes more on that though when I move on to storage so if your fan support you get six total headers on the board all of them 4-pin with auto detection of PWM or DC voltage control there's two CPU fan connectors up above the CPU socket two more along the right near the SATA ports for system fans then two more along the left just above the PCI Express the left header here provides up to three amps for high speed high current fans and the right one is a pump header tuned for DC or PWM water cooling pumps there are also seven temperature sensors scattered throughout the board all software accessible and of course the fan extension header lets you add three more fans and three more temperature sensors via that accessory along the bottom of the board starting from the lower right you've got front panel connectors an XMP switch to force your memory to use XMP mode a CPU over voltage header to increase the voltage values available for overclocking and SLI and crossfire switch to more easily configure two-way in three way GPU setups this will also light up the corresponding PCIe slots with their LEDs to tell you which slot to install your GPUs do that's kind of nice the thunderbolt header for the add-in card a USB 2.0 and a couple USB 3.0 headers and RGB header to connect compatible RGB LED strips and like I have setup right here in front of me trusted platform module header fan extension header and q code button and a debug LED which is great for troubleshooting boot problems surface mounted power and reset buttons thanks for not forgetting those by the way Asus and finally s/pdif and front panel audio headers storage options are plentiful on this board there's a couple you two connectors for PCIe SSD s like the Intel 750 series and the single vertical key mm2 slot next to the 24-pin power supporting up to 80 millimeter length SSDs vertical orientation means it takes up less board real estate and your m2 SSD will stay cooler you also get 10 a total SATA rev three ports one through six have raid support four through eight have SATA Express option and nine and ten are just normal SATA ports just tucked away under the x99 chipset heatsink you can of course add another MDOT to via the accessory riser card going back to the PCIe lanes and connectivity though remember that just because all these ports and slots exist doesn't mean you can use them all at the same time the manual elucidates the situation a little bit less Tang which connections share bandwidth mainly via the PCI Express slots of sharing bandwidth with either the u2 and Batou or USB 3.1 connections for most people this won't be an issue but double check these conflicts if you really were planning for a three-way GPU set up with a couple you two drives nnm to you probably can't do all that at the same time moving up the right side of the board we have a closer look at the aforementioned u2 and vertical MDOT two connectors 24-pin main power connection and the asus memo pad button which is great for troubleshooting memory problems for power delivery around the CPU socket you have an eight phase-- design with premium quality MOSFETs chokes and caps and of course those two large dedicated heat sinks and a heat pipe connecting them with the second one kind of tucked into the i/o panel to get some of that heat out towards the rear of the system supplemental CPU power is delivered via eight pin and four pin connectors at the top of the board next ninety nine deluxe features crystal sound three audio not quite as high end as rog boards since it uses a more standard Realtek ALC 1150 codec chip asus has made sure to give it the best conditions possible though with Japanese made audio capacitors a power pre regulator and audio amplifier and a pop filter circuit crystal sound three supports eight channel surround and the components are EMI shielded with a PCB separation layer to minimize interference on the rear panel IO on the left is a BIOS reset button that can also be used for the USB BIOS flashback features still one of my favorite Asus features in last five or ten years there's two Intel gigabit NICs wired in with the Asus LAN guard to resist static discharge and power surges for USB 3.0 ports with fast charge four USB 2.0 ports for more USB 3.1 ports one of them with a type-c connector 3x3 antenna connectors for the 13 megabits per second 802 that 11 AC dual band Wi-Fi and finally the gold plated audio connections 8-inch jacks for mic in a channel surround out or an optical Toslink s/pdif connection ok next up we're going to take a quick tour of the asus UEFI and then we'll wrap up with an aura RGB LED demo so here's the ACS UEFI BIOS and it's an easy mode right now this is the default gives you a quick look at what BIOS for you have CPU installed memory installed that kind of things CPU voltage temperature easy system tuning is over here so you can switch between some presets for normal quiet performance energy-saving boot priorities here you can drag and drop to move stuff around you can actually pull up a whole boot menu as well what SATA devices are connected DRAM status and XMP and your fan profile down here I have some access to some pretty useful stuff here like cue fan control you can actually select any of the fans in your system and set up a custom fan curve for them which is pretty convenient also of course you still have Advanced Mode so if you hit f7 we can go over that in advanced mode is probably gonna be a little bit more familiar for you guys who've done a lot of overclocking and stuff in the past you can set up a favourites area where you can sort of pin things that you go to frequently if the easy mode isn't good enough for you your main option ai Tweaker here is where you do all of your overclocking stuff by core and of course you have all the low level access to stuff such as DRAM time timing and digi+ power control and CPU power management tweakers paradise all the really low-level things that I'm too scared to actually mess with myself now you might notice here that I have a four point four gigahertz overclock that's been enabled here actually did that with the five way optimization with the Asus software more on that in just a second anyway here's advanced configurations for PCH and CPU and all that good stuff monitoring things such as CPU temperature and you can actually adjust those all individually or monitor them here boot of course you can switch fastboot mode or those different things and then you've you have the tools over here I wanted to show the easy flash 3 utility which will lets you update the BIOS now has easy simple access so you can update straight from the internet rather than downloading your BIOS and putting it on a flash drive for example and then you also have secure erase function in here which is great for wiping an SSD and putting it back and kind of factory defaults situate factory default settings which is nice for an SSD that you might have found is slowing down and great to be able to do it here right from the UEFI back to that overclock though I always like to run Asus 5 way optimization when I get one of these boards just to throw in a chip and see what happens it starts off with the automatic overclocking or Auto tuning it runs some automatic stress tests on the CPU and just ramps up the frequency until it gets to a point where cheeves instability for this was my 59 30k got to 4.4 gigahertz running it at one point two seven five volts which is a very nice straightforward good overclock that most people would be happy with and I got it with a single click it also runs through the rest of the five way optimization so TPU fan expert 3 is next so it reaches out tests all the fans in your system gets their min and Max values and sets them to a reasonable fan curve for quiet quietness as well as you know performance EPU and DIGI+ power control are also power savings features for the full whole system as well as for the digital digital power delivery specifically for the CPU and here's a demo of the asus or RGB lighting and since I know RGB LED lighting it's not for everyone look there's an off switch they all just turned off isn't that nice do note that the debug LED and the power resets LEDs do stay on even though the RGB LEDs are turned off and am i turning the back on you might notice that there's four different distinct areas here so let me switch over to static audio PCIe PCH and LED strip so the audio is actually this bit right over here the crystal sound which I'm hopefully pointing to with my knife yes crystal sound right there there's also the PCI Express slot snaps or that kind of catches that light up four of those do right there you can see the lower three right now the top one is currently blocked by the graphics card there's also lighting just above the chipset which is probably the hardest to see here but it would illuminate kind of the area just above the chipset again kind of blocked by the graphics card right now but then you might also notice that I have an LED strip plugged in down here this is a cable mod RGB LED strip and it is specifically sent to me or was specifically sent to me for the Maximus 8 formula video however I did notice that the RGB is not in the proper orientation so you might notice when I'm set to static if I switch to say green for example whereas the lights on the motherboard are kind of green or they should be right green oh I'm only controlling the LED strip let's synchronize yeah he's a good nice okay with everything synchronized you notice if I switch to green the motherboard LEDs are green but the LED strip below is blue so you can do red fine because the Reds are right look everything's kind of red we're ready pink or something in that area however blue and green are switched you could fix this by either swapping getting the the connector cable and swapping the lead or Asus could put back the calibration function that was there for RGB with the original Ora software I don't know where it went maybe I just couldn't find it it was hidden originally but anyway so right now we can see mainboard at the top because that is what I currently have installed if you had a graphics card it would also show up here you have settings for startup and shutdown so there are LEDs that are on while the system is shutdown but you can control that function here just as was the startup you have of course the features that you would expect such as static and breathing these are what are very common when it comes to RGB LEDs in general now but I am happy to say that there are some other options here strobing I've never found to be all that useful strobing and double strobing that seems to be popular but color cycle is useful especially if you're using the add-on RGB LED strip because then it's cycling through colors and you can't tell them that they're the crane and the bluer wear swaps rainbow of course is also an option here and that will sort of cycle through a bunch of rainbows you might notice here you also control over the speed and then there's also direction direction comes in with some of these other effects they've implemented I really kind of like comment so comment will kind of cycle through you can see it kind of crossing over and you can switch downstream or upstream so that just kind of switches the direction that it goes in back and forth so you can see how if you had this installed in a case you could actually get a pretty cool effect you can also cycle cycle back and forth so go one way and then the other and then of course you can control the speed here as well this is going to synchronize automatically because it's Rainbow Comet flash and - I also thought was kind of fun it controls the actual intensity of lighting so you kind of a flash as it cycles through the different things those another so a couple really cool effects that I think Asus is implemented here that actually found useful as opposed to just the regular static and breathing of course you can get some more practical stuff like CPU temperature to turn that one on and it will change the color based on the temperature of your CPU and then if you have music going on you can switch to music effect and the lighting will strobe along with the music as it plays in your system so in conclusion the things I like about this motherboard our that it is a significantly updated version of the x99 deluxe that I've been using an arctic panther back there for over a year now more m2 u2 and USB 3.1 and type-c are very welcome on this platform five-way optimization with automatic overclocking works great and the board has all the features you could want within reason the accessory package as well is very nice also the LED lighting I know it's not for everyone but it's integrated well and the aura software has come a long way even just since my Maximus aid formula video that I did a couple months back it's nice to see some built-in effects other than static or breathing that I might actually want to use and the synchronization works very well as for cons I would say it's expensive but honestly with the added accessories it's not that bad compared to some of the highest-end x99 boards out there I've mentioned the limitations with connectivity if you really want to max the board out so a PL X chip to add PCIe lanes would definitely have been cool but I think that probably would've driven the price up to the $500 plus range so to sum up this is a beautiful feature packed and well designed motherboard and I think any enthusiast who's dropping a couple grand on a Broadwell e workstation and gaming build will be very happy with it links to this motherboard on Amazon as well as my Paul's hardware store you can buy shirts and other stuff like it are down in the description below hit that like button too and get subscribed to my channel if you enjoyed and as always thank you very much for watching my videos