ASUS M5A99X EVO Review

👤by Brendan van Varik Comments 📅19-10-12
A Closer Look

The motherboard itself is built on a black PCB which has become highly favourable within the PC community. ASUS opted to use their black and blue colour scheme with a little bit of white/grey thrown in for a PCIe slot and a few other little things. This is a common colour scheme found on their motherboards today, except for the ROG series which use black and red.



The CPU socket is designed for processors of up to 140W, and the heatsink has been developed to be able to cope with high loads. The heatsink directly south to the VRM cooling system is to take care of the heat from the Northbridge/chipset. It is linked to the VRM cooling via one heat pipe. The range of processors range from the AMD Sempron CPUs, right the way up to the latest AMD octo-core FX CPUs. The power delivery consists of a 6 + 2 phase design. It takes the power from an 8-pin EPS/CPU power socket.



The DIMM slots can take up to 1866MHz RAM by default and they support a maximum of 32GB of un-buffered memory in total. There are two power phases which control the voltage delivery for your RAM modules and towards the south end of the slots, you will find an internal USB 3.0 header. There is a MemOK! button on the top right-hand-side of the motherboard.



The SATA configuration consists of six SATA 6Gbps ports and two SATA 3Gbps ports. They are all at right angles to make the routing of cables easier, and so that none of them will be obstructed when large graphics cards are used. On the SATA 6Gbps ports, RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 are supported. The two internal SATA 3Gbps ports are controlled by a JMicron JMB362 controller. It also powers the Power eSATA 3Gbps port (green) and the eSATA 3Gbps port (red) on the IO panel.



The expansion consists of two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots which runs in either x16 or x8 + x8, one PCIe 2.0 x16 (black) slot which runs at x4 speeds, two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and a legacy PCI slot to finish off. NVIDIA Quad-GPU SLI and AMD Quad-GPU CrossFireX are both supported on this motherboard using the blue and white slots. The slots are spaced with a dual GPU configuration in mind. If you are using a GPU which is cooled by a dual slot cooler, there is one slot worth’s of space to allow the top card to breathe a little better.



To finish off, lets take a look at the IO panel. Going form left to right, we have a PS2 port which can be used for either a keyboard or a mouse, but not both at the same time. Two USB 2.0 ports are beneath it and a optical S/PDIF connection is next in line, followed by two more USB 2.0 ports, a IEEE 1394a port and the Power eSATA 3Gbps port. Carrying on, in red, we have two USB 2.0 ports and an eSATA 3Gbps connection, two USB 3.0 ports with a 1Gbps LAN port and a further two USB 2.0 ports next to it, which leaves us the six audio jacks, which are powered by the Realtek ALC892 audio chip to finish it all off.



15 pages « 3 4 5 6 > »

Comments