Layout

At a first glance the ASUS X99-WS/IPMI leaves a very good impression with a good looking and clean design. The manufacturer decided to go for a combination of black and anthracite, which suites nicely and in the end you get an aesthetic looking product with a clean layout. Talking about the layout; it is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install large coolers. As we already mentioned the CPU socket as well as the DIMM slots have been rotated by 90° in order to optimize airflow in server cases. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allows for an easy installation of oversized graphics cards. Apart of that there are four additional SATA ports at the bottom edge of the motherboard.



The ASUS X99-WS/IPMI comes with a digital 8+4 phase power design, whereas the CPU is backed up by eight phases and the memory by four. Like we've already explained on the features page ASUS is making use of an extensive solution. Furthermore ASUS equips this board with their so called "BlackWing Chokes". Apart from that these chokes can cope with up to 60A per phase. A closer look at the capacitors reveals there are 12K Black Metallic Caps, which have an average life span of 12'000 hours.


Totally you'll find eight DIMM-slots on the ASUS X99-WS/IPMI. Officially supported are DDR4, 3200+(OC) / 3000+(OC) / 2933+(OC) / 2800(OC) / 2400(OC) / 2133 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 2.0.



The PCH on this board is being cooled by a passive cooling block. A closer look at the VRM area where shows that there is another heatsink taking care of adequate cooling. Thanks to the fact, that the new Core i7-5960X as well as Core i7-5930K support a total of 40 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, there is no need for an additional PLX chip. 40 lanes are sufficient for 4-way setups and there are even 8 lanes left to install for example a powerful PCIe SSD (should there still be space on the board).

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 3 - Features	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 4 - Layout	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 19 - Tomb Raider
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 21 - Thief
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 22 - Right Mark Audio Analyzer
Page 9 - 3DMark	Page 23 - BCLK Overclocking
Page 10 - 3DMark 11	Page 24 - Power Consumption
Page 11 - 3DMark Vantage	Page 25 - Performance Rating
Page 12 - PC Mark 8	Page 26 - Price Comparison
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1	Page 27 - Conclusion
Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2