A Closer Look
While it doesn’t have the same extreme clockwork styling of the Taichi series of motherboards, it’s still a pretty neat looking bit of hardware. The PCB and hardware sticks to a black and slate grey finish, so it’ll blend in with your system nicely. Of course, there’s RGB support here, so it’ll stand out against the darker hardware.
Power!
With an 11 Power Phase design, delivering the extreme power the 2066 X-Series CPUs require shouldn’t be a problem.
VRM issues on X299? Not on this motherboard, there aren’t! That’s some seriously heavy metal covering those power phases, and there’s even a heat pipe joining them for more even heat dissipation.
All that power comes from two 8-pin CPU headers. You only need one, but if you opt to use both, you get improved voltage stability, and that could easily help with overclocking. With 60A Power Chokes, cranking those voltages shouldn’t be an issue.
Premium Hardware
The motherboard features four DIMM slots, down from the usual eight for X299, but this is an mATX motherboard. The board is dotted with premium-grade Nichicon 12K Black Caps too, which have a 12,000 hour (minimum) lifespan.
There are eight SATA 6 ports, as well as Ultra M.2 slots for up to 32 Gb/s speeds.
Armoured Slots
There are three PCIe slots, which comprises of two 16x slots and one 8x slot. For dual GPU configurations, the armoured design ensures the motherboard can handle the weight of heavy graphics cards with ease.
Golden Sound
Take your audio seriously? You’ll be happy to see Nichicon Fine Gold Audio Caps powering the ALC 1220 chipset. There’s also a TI NE5532 headphone amp, PCB isolations and more. What’s pretty cool is that even the front panel audio header has gold pins, as do the rear 3.5mm jacks.
The rear I/O is pretty straightforward, but not without its surprises. There are dual GbE ports, plenty of USB connections, and even a type C. If you get caught needing a refresh, you’ll also find BIOS reset controls here too.
Where are the temperature results? They’re missing from page 6.