I had high expectations for this mid priced MB. After a little over a week with it up and running, I'm left feeling a little disappointed and wishing I had chosen another manufacturer's product at this point. There's quite a few things that are annoyances with this board and some are attributed to it not playing nicely with Windows 7 x64. You may have different experiences with W8 or 10 so please keep this in mind when reading this review.
The first complaint is with the USB ports. My focusrite scarlet 2i4 USB 2.0 audio interface.will not function properly with this board, even using the 2.0 ports and latest driver for the device. Tried every latency and windows sound setting under the sun and still get crackles and pops, whereas it ran perfect on my p5n-d board with the same O/S.
My Logitech M510 wireless mouse, which operates through a USB 2.0 unifying plug, plugged into a USB 2.0 port, stutters like you can't believe. Once again, drivers up to date and no work arounds found.
When windows boots up , there's a few momentary freezes during the microsoft start-up screen.
When watching a movie using PotPlayer or VLC, there's an occasional pop you can hear on the movie audio track that's not file related.
The first time you click on a file in windows explorer to start a program, the click noise you hear (normal windows click sound), is delayed like it's not synched up. Then subsequent clicks on files are syched up. Weird lag problems aren't they.
Finally the wonderful UEFI ASUS bios. Don't know if this is my board specific or all of them but when moving a hard drive to a different SATA port and restarting windows, it goes to ASUS bios screen like it should. But when you change the boot order, the mouse will freeze and not let you drag your selected drive to the top of the boot order list. Does this intermittently. Sometimes it works, other time you have to reboot and try again. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 times to get the setting to 'take' before it will boot normally into windows. Sometimes after you save the bios setting, it will boot into windows repair mode for no apparent reason. I ran some diagnostics on my hardware using the windows diagnostic utility and I'm getting all green lights on hardware and windows system files. Nothing has yellow flags in device manager in hardware or PCI or USB. I'm chalking this all up to USB lag with drivers that are incompatible or just poor ASUS usb ports. Backwards compatible my eye. Everything I loaded up, is the latest version off the ASUS website. And speaking of website, what a joke. Want to flash the bios just using your intuition and past experience? Good luck. No documentation on the website that instructs (or maybe anywhere, except an obscure web site I found, called 'Building a new computer for music production'. Read that guy's tale of woe with this exact same MOBO) that you MUST rename their packed Bios file to: X99AU31.CAP (in all caps)
The packed file on the ASUS site has some long file name that the Bios won't recognize until you rename it. Thanks to ASUS for letting me waste a good hour finding all that out on my own. Ever hear of putting documentation in with the archive file? Also make sure your on the x99-a/usb 3 web page and not the other similar web page for the non usb 3.1 board. Some of the google links will take you to the wrong page with the other board, so be careful as those Bios won't work.
The things I like about the board are the on board power button so you can see if it goes to bios while you have things hooked up and sitting on top of your mobo box before putting it all in your case. The Q connector is really nice feature so you don't have to get out a magnifying glass trying to see which pins are for your reset button and drive activity light etc. The fan control and overclocking options in Bios are top notch. Like the fan profile options.
All in all, this is a decent board but I have to knock off stars when your old DDR2 board has better hardware compatibility than something that just came out about a year ago. No excuse for that imo. The intent was to let people know exactly what I'm trying to run on it and what to expect if you have some slightly older hardware hooked up to it. One thing I don't want to do is have to buy a new audio interface and mouse just because of USB ASUS driver issues. Before that happens, I'll probably give Windows 8 a whirl to see if that solves anything. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
| RAM | DDR4 3000 (o.c.) |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 2133 MHz |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 4 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 4 |
