14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Haswell-E central processing units, the Extreme Edition Core i7 series, are just around the corner, which means that both them and supporting motherboards are about to go through the first big sales wave. ASUS intends to be on top of that wave.
Admittedly, this goes for every PC motherboard maker in the world. After all, there are several favorable marketing conditions that can boost their chances at increasing their revenue.
One is the obvious hype surrounding the powerful Intel Core i7 Haswell-E CPUs, even though their price and performance range mean the customer base is just a fraction of the PC owners and buyers worldwide.
Another is the fact that these CPUs are not supported by any existing motherboards, so anyone who wants them will need to buy an LGA 2011-3 mainboard as well.
The third factor to take into account is that this is the back-to-school season, and sales of, well, everything usually spike during this period.
Basically, this is the perfect time for ASUS to unveil its flagship socket LGA 2011-3 motherboard, called ASUS X99-Deluxe.
You only need to look at it to realize that the company means serious business. The black and white color theme is quite telling, as is the special, sleek design of the I/O rear panel. Clearly, ASUS has paid attention to aesthetic value as much as it did to performance.
At the middle of the upper half of the motherboard you can see the CPU socket itself, powered by an 8-phase VRM (voltage regulation module).
The socket is wired to eight DDR4 memory slots, which should have an easy time handling DDR4-2,133 to DDR4-3000 and beyond. There are no 16 GB modules yet, but they will be released in 2015, at which point you'll be able to outfit your computer with 128 GB of DDR4 RAM.
Up next, let's look at the four PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, which allow for quad-SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU setups. Not sure if they can all work in x16 mode or if they're limited to x8 in that situation. Either way, there's a lot of potential there.
Oddly enough, ASUS also included a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot (electrical x4), plus a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot. They should be able to handle a special Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card if nothing else.
Moving on, the ASUS X99 Deluxe also boasts an M.2 slot with PCI Express 2.0 x4 physical layer, meaning that M.2 SSDs can reach 1.8 GB/s transfer speeds thanks to it. Other connectors include 14 USB 3.0 ports, 12 SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors, and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
8-channel audio (Crystal Sound 2) with high SNR DAC, audio-grade electrolytic capacitors, ground-layer isolation and headphones amp round up the spec sheet. It's really too bad that the price isn't known yet.
