Asus X99-A II Review

Performance Analysis

There's not too much to write home about with the benchmark results for the simple reason there's not a lot of variation across the board. However, the X99-A II put in a solid effort and was never far from the top results we've seen. It didn't seem to Turbo as aggressively as some boards we've seen though, which did limit its prowess in a couple of areas such as the PCMark 8 tests, but where all eight cores were under sustained heavy load, it fared better.

Once overclocked, the power consumption was actually quite low for a system of this sort, with only one other ATX board dipping under its results of 419W with two idle R9 290's in tow. The overclock saw some handy gains across the board, especially in the video editing, photo editing and rendering tests. Battlefield 4, on the other hand, is a game that doesn't benefit hugely from CPU speed as our results show, at least if you have a two-way GPU system. On the other hand, Bioshock Infinite is an example that does and we saw a near 20fps added to the minimum frame rate, rising from 88fps to 106fps.


The storage result was on the ball with nothing bad to report and as all the SATA 6Gbps ports are Intel-powered, there's no need to avoid slower ASMedia ports with your SSDs. We also saw the maximum 2,300MB/sec read speed using our in-house Samsung SSD 950 Pro too, although we don't have any comparison numbers with other X99 boards yet so we haven't included a graph.

Finally, audio performance was excellent and the X99-A II had a slight edge over much of the competition, with only the Asus X99 Sabertooth managing better using the standard testing methodology.

Conclusion

The Asus X99-A II is a solid motherboard with plenty of useful features and a lot more besides. The lighting control may not be everyone's cup of tea, but aesthetics is one of the few areas that differentiates boards these days. Performance is close between the slowest and fastest boards we've tested and only audio performance differs significantly. Thankfully it scores highly in both areas and this, coupled with a great set of software and hardware features, means that if you're after an X99 board for a single or dual-GPU setup, the X99-A II comes highly recommended.