Asus Prime X299-Deluxe Motherboard Review

[Crashman]

The Prime X299-Deluxe brings a slew of features to the high-end market, but are those features valuable enough to justify its relatively high price?

Asus Prime X299-Deluxe Motherboard Review : Read more

 

[Guest]

489 dollars? lol

 

[Crashman]

489 dollars? lol

I expect it to drop quickly to $459 if that means anything to you

 

[the nerd 389]

If the state of Skylake-X is any indication, I'd expect it to drop quite a bit lower than $459. Intel seems to be turning disappointing product releases into an art form.

Can you imagine trying to fit one of these CPUs into a 2U chassis? It would be a nightmare.

 

[Crashman]

If the state of Skylake-X is any indication, I'd expect it to drop quite a bit lower than $459. Intel seems to be turning disappointing product releases into an art form.

Can you imagine trying to fit one of these CPUs into a 2U chassis? It would be a nightmare.

I don't expect anyone to be shoving this board into a 2U chassis It's a premium board, you pay an extra $120 for all the stuff that comes with it.

Now that whole Kaby Lake X nonsense makes even less sense, right?

 

[Tom Griffin]

This might be able to replace my ASUS X79 Pro and I7-3960x paid a grand for that proc with six cores etc; this 10 core beast might just fill the bill for my development workstation. Will have to wait and see about AMD and infinity fabric and Intel's mesh and firmware updates.

 

[drwho1]

I don't get this SATA sharing, In this motherboard as an example we end up with 4 usable SATA ports... I need a lot more SATA ports available for JBOD drives. At minimum 10 SATA ports, I wish I could find a board with 18 SATA ports to be honest.

Anyway, I passed on this... We need a way for M.2, U.2 and PCI-E to NOT share SATA ports, same for any new tech... should find something else to make useless...

 

[Crashman]

I don't get this SATA sharing, In this motherboard as an example we end up with 4 usable SATA ports... I need a lot more SATA ports available for JBOD drives. At minimum 10 SATA ports, I wish I could find a board with 18 SATA ports to be honest.

Anyway, I passed on this... We need a way for M.2, U.2 and PCI-E to NOT share SATA ports, same for any new tech... should find something else to make useless...

Welcome to the world of Kaby Lake X. These are the workarounds Asus put into the board to support it. If you want a bunch of drives, you have to use an adapter card and give up 3-way SLI (on 44-lane CPUs) or SLI (on 28 or 16 lane CPUs).

 

[Dill3377]

Hopefully the FPS issues get worked out with the ASUS X299 deluxe board, was looking at getting a 7820X for gaming and light video editing for friends (yes I know it's crazy overkill, whole system is lol, it's a hobby), but that MSI board is killing it and I'm avoiding MSI if at all possible for mobo...

 

[the nerd 389]

Hopefully the FPS issues get worked out with the ASUS X299 deluxe board, was looking at getting a 7820X for gaming and light video editing for friends (yes I know it's crazy overkill, whole system is lol, it's a hobby), but that MSI board is killing it and I'm avoiding MSI if at all possible for mobo...

It's not that it's overkill. It's actually not overkill at all. It's just very expensive, an epic pain to cool, and offers a dizzying array of incompatibilities and caveats for the price.

Save your money for ThreadRipper, or stick to Broadwell-E. Skylake-X isn't worth the effort, confusion, noise, or cost that comes with the 2066 socket. If you really need the performance, grab a dual socket E5 setup before considering the X299 platform. It's easier to cool, makes system design simpler, and you'll end up with a quieter machine.

 

[Dill3377]

Hopefully the FPS issues get worked out with the ASUS X299 deluxe board, was looking at getting a 7820X for gaming and light video editing for friends (yes I know it's crazy overkill, whole system is lol, it's a hobby), but that MSI board is killing it and I'm avoiding MSI if at all possible for mobo...

It's not that it's overkill. It's actually not overkill at all. It's just very expensive, an epic pain to cool, and offers a dizzying array of incompatibilities and caveats for the price.

Save your money for ThreadRipper, or stick to Broadwell-E. Skylake-X isn't worth the effort, confusion, noise, or cost that comes with the 2066 socket. If you really need the performance, grab a dual socket E5 setup before considering the X299 platform. It's easier to cool, makes system design simpler, and you'll end up with a quieter machine.

Yeah man I appreciate the advice and understand. Spent too many hours looking into all my options. To be frank, I don't think AMD will release an 8 core TR chip that's faster than the Ryzen 1700/1800 so as not to cannibalize their own product and the 7820x is performing 10-15% above the Ryzen chips for games. Money is not a factor for the most part, If I was interested in a single one of the other X299 chips I'd at least wait for TR4/Coffeelake, but the 7820x has no direct competitor, outside of Ryzen, and I don't think it will for a while. As for cooling, running custom water with a fairly beefy setup, not crazy worried about noise/heat (although I'm really unimpressed with how Intel has handled the heat..). OC3d is showing a 7820X running at 4.8Ghz at 1.22V with roughly 70 degrees under load. Even if he won the silicon lottery, I'd be fine with 4.5GHz at a similar voltage/temerpature. My 3570k runs at 4.6 at 1.2V and hits 65 under custom.

As for purchasing it, I will definitely wait for more reviews and maturation before I do. To add, the anti-consumer things intel does, albeit a dick move, don't affect me. I don't RAID, I'll never SLI, I'm only going to be running 1 NVMe drive. This truly is just an overkill gaming rig and I won't 'upgrade' my 3570k to another 4 core option, so 8 it is.

One last note: I am not trying to defend Intel at all and quite frankly, I want to give my money to team red, but I'm in a very specific boat and thus, not a lot of option left imo. I unfortunately/fortunately game at 144Hz and that 10% difference actually makes a difference lol, it's a vicious world. My 3570k is starting to hold my 1080ti in some games, so I've had to upgrade for a bit now.

 

[Crashman]

The easiest answer would be "Intel launched this two weeks too early". It might not be exactly right, but it's probably a close-enough guess.

 

[Dill3377]

The easiest answer would be "Intel launched this two weeks too early". It might not be exactly right, but it's probably a close-enough guess.

I concur, the original launch of August would have been significantly better suited in terms of time to make the platform better. However, they really screwed the bed when they used TIM and introduced RAID keys, I understand not wanting to cannibalize their Xeon sales, but that's just anti-consumer as hell.

 

[Crashman]

The easiest answer would be "Intel launched this two weeks too early". It might not be exactly right, but it's probably a close-enough guess.

I concur, the original launch of August would have been significantly better suited in terms of time to make the platform better. However, they really screwed the bed when they used TIM and introduced RAID keys, I understand not wanting to cannibalize their Xeon sales, but that's just anti-consumer as hell.

Right, I won't be using it. I've had RAID 1 for the past 10 years and needed it twice in that time. But I would use the platform for a gaming and entertainment PC

And I know people who store all backups to a network drive. And I know other people who store all backups to cloud servers. I won't diminish any of their ideas

 

[Dill3377]

The easiest answer would be "Intel launched this two weeks too early". It might not be exactly right, but it's probably a close-enough guess.

I concur, the original launch of August would have been significantly better suited in terms of time to make the platform better. However, they really screwed the bed when they used TIM and introduced RAID keys, I understand not wanting to cannibalize their Xeon sales, but that's just anti-consumer as hell.

Right, I won't be using it. I've had RAID 1 for the past 10 years and needed it twice in that time. But I would use the platform for a gaming and entertainment PC

And I know people who store all backups to a network drive. And I know other people who store all backups to cloud servers. I won't diminish any of their ideas

Completely fair, I'm looking at a 7820X for simply gaming and entertainment as well. I don't want to 'upgrade' to a 4 core for the next 5 years, So I'm going multi-core with good IPC, Ryzen is a great choice, but I'm looking for the small extras. As I said in another post, coffeelake/kaby lake makes kaby lake-x useless as it does the 7800X, TR4 will destroy the i9 series in terms of price/performance for the average user, the 7820X has little competition outside of the 1700x/1800x and to be frank, being a 144Hz gamer, that little bit of Intel IPC matters unfortunately I will wait for platform maturation however.

 

[Danilushka]

The Intel x299, with its limited PCI lanes for even their most powerful CPUs is an over-priced freaking disaster. either wait for Intel to sober up from their panic drunken bender over Ryzen, Threadripper, and Vortex and produce decent mainboards and CPUs again or by AMD (provided they deliver).

 

[Nintendork]

From a 3960X, Ryzen 7 1700X is already a huge upgrade, around twice the performance with half the power consumption.

 

[jasonelmore]

Asus has lost their way on workstation boards. They barely have any sata ports at all, and only 4 USB 3.0/3.1. I really dont know what they were thinking.. Intel should just allow Asus to make boards that lack Kaby-Lake X Support, that way we get all of the I/O we paid for on a 44 Lane $1K CPU.

 

[Crashman]

Asus has lost their way on workstation boards. They barely have any sata ports at all, and only 4 USB 3.0/3.1. I really dont know what they were thinking.. Intel should just allow Asus to make boards that lack Kaby-Lake X Support, that way we get all of the I/O we paid for on a 44 Lane $1K CPU.

I think they would be allowed, but didn't...out of fear that 2,000 people would buy them for KLX anyway and then attempt to destroy their reputation over the lack of KLX support. So yes, Intel screwed with motherboard makers on this release, just as they had with the 28-lane CPUs previously, but to a greater extent.

 

[Crashman]

I don't get this SATA sharing, In this motherboard as an example we end up with 4 usable SATA ports... I need a lot more SATA ports available for JBOD drives. At minimum 10 SATA ports, I wish I could find a board with 18 SATA ports to be honest.

Anyway, I passed on this... We need a way for M.2, U.2 and PCI-E to NOT share SATA ports, same for any new tech... should find something else to make useless...

First JBOD drives are not affected by SATA sharing because they are not RAID , and the drives dont work at the same time when you access a file on the JBOD drive , SATA sharing is perfect for JBOD setup.

RAID setup on the other hand suffers from SATA sharing.

If you want 18 drives get SAS card with 6 ports .. each SAS port will expand to four SATA ports.

I don't get this SATA sharing, In this motherboard as an example we end up with 4 usable SATA ports... I need a lot more SATA ports available for JBOD drives. At minimum 10 SATA ports, I wish I could find a board with 18 SATA ports to be honest.

Anyway, I passed on this... We need a way for M.2, U.2 and PCI-E to NOT share SATA ports, same for any new tech... should find something else to make useless...

Welcome to the world of Kaby Lake X. These are the workarounds Asus put into the board to support it. If you want a bunch of drives, you have to use an adapter card and give up 3-way SLI (on 44-lane CPUs) or SLI (on 28 or 16 lane CPUs).

Who said so ? intel did it right this time , using 28 lanes , you have 3x8 for 3 GPU plus 4 lanes for a Raid card that can give you upto 8 SAS ports (each can support 4 SATA drives)

and the 44 lanes can give you 4 GPU plus 12 free lanes (three x4 cards , or one x8 and one x4)

You left out the 16-lake Kaby Lake X which is what I said in the first place. I could just copy the post you responded to in reply: Basically some of the configurations advantages available to 28-lane processors were sacrificed in order to improve the configuration with 16-lane processors.

 

[martinigm]

I've had my Asus p8-z77 + 3770k for five years. Even if X299-deluxe + 9700X is kind of pricy up front the price over several years is not bad at all.

 

[the nerd 389]

I don't get this SATA sharing, In this motherboard as an example we end up with 4 usable SATA ports... I need a lot more SATA ports available for JBOD drives. At minimum 10 SATA ports, I wish I could find a board with 18 SATA ports to be honest.

Anyway, I passed on this... We need a way for M.2, U.2 and PCI-E to NOT share SATA ports, same for any new tech... should find something else to make useless...

Welcome to the world of Kaby Lake X. These are the workarounds Asus put into the board to support it. If you want a bunch of drives, you have to use an adapter card and give up 3-way SLI (on 44-lane CPUs) or SLI (on 28 or 16 lane CPUs).

Who said so ? intel did it right this time , using 28 lanes , you have 3x8 for 3 GPU plus 4 lanes for a Raid card that can give you upto 8 SAS ports (each can support 4 SATA drives)

and the 44 lanes can give you 4 GPU plus 12 free lanes (three x4 cards , or one x8 and one x4)

In my view, 28 lanes isn't enough for a high-end build if you want to do anything special with it. Such things might include:
a 10 GbE card (or two for the sake of redundancy),
a 4k capture card,
a Thunderbolt card,
dual 4 lane NVMe drives,
a mid-range DAQ card (niche, yes, but I use them),
on-board components like the audio codec (generally, several x1 devices),
etc.

There are many situations where you could use more than 28 lanes without needing more than 8 cores. Video editing builds/mastering stations are the most likely to have issues with the reduction in PCIe lanes in the mid-range models. Unfortunately, those mid-range models have been the go-to solution in that space for quite a while now, and the new limitations make the SKL-X models significantly less appealing.

Many of the other applications that are affected are quite niche, but they do exist. It doesn't really sit well with me that, for those applications, the cost of the CPU effectively doubled with this generation if I were to stick with Intel. Many of these builds are also noise-sensitive, and the thermal design of SKL-X models would be enough to prohibit their usage outright in those situations. I deal with that sort of build quite frequently, and I've had to delay a number of projects as a result of the issues with SKL-X. Fortunately, ThreadRipper is on the horizon to address the issues, and should allow the projects that I've spec'd out to move forward on budget with modern hardware. I just hope that they are easier to cool than SKL-X.

 

[Crashman]

I think we should demand a new form factor from the industry. now we have 64 lanes chips and 44 lanes chips and the size of the motherboard is not enough for all those lanes.

Lets assume we have 4 GPUs , this will take 4 slots with 8 slots spacing. and then we need 4 more slots (intel 44 lanes has 12 extra=3 x4 slots , and AMD 32 extra lanes (four x8 slots) .. so we need total of 8 slots .

the 4 GPU slots must have 2 slots spacing and the other 4 single slot spacing . so we end up in 8+4=12 slots Cases and motherboard standard.

and we call it SuperATX ?

SuperMicro made a similar motherboard , but we need to standardize it ...

Foxconn did UltraATX but never produced a board for it. Lian-Li produced a case to match at the event where Foxconn was showing off its proposed form factor.

10-slots max. If you called it Extended Ultra-ATX and made it 13" deep, I'm sure everyone on the east side of Brexit would be happy