ASUS M5A99X EVO Pro Reviews

ASUS’s M5A99X EVO and M5A97 EVO mainboards are high-quality products which only differ from their top-end cousins in the variety of additional controllers and expansion slots. Their functionality is board enough and includes all modern interfaces: USB 3.0, SATA 6 Gbit/s, eSATA and IEEE1394 (FireWire). So if you do not plan to use a lot of graphics cards, each of them can be a good choice. The only downside is that the overclocking potential of the junior chipsets is lower than that of the flagship AMD 990FX. And we’re talking about ASUS mainboards which have turned out to be the best choice for overclocking the new Bulldozer series. The results are going to be even more disappointing with other mainboards, we guess. Anyway, we have no doubt about the bright market future of the M5A99X EVO and M5A97 EVO mainboards. People who look for highest performance prefer Intel whereas AMD users have other priorities. The AMD platform is quite good for building an affordable computer with acceptable performance and these ASUS mainboards cost much less than their flagship counterparts.

The M5A99X is another gem from Asus. Just as its little brother, it offers a great amount of features for the price range it is aimed at. It does feature full CrossFire and SLI support, and if a user does want to go the multi-GPU route, this should be the entry level solution that should be considered. Support for both major multi-GPU architectures is key here. Full use of all six SATA 6G headers from the SB950 chip is a big plus, and the ability to run e-SATA with the ASMedia controller gives a little bit more flexibility. The addition of Firewire is nice as well, but happily we are seeing fewer and fewer new products supporting that connectivity option.

Right now, the problem for any 9-series motherboard isn't that there's no big performance difference between any of them; it's that the only reason to upgrade from an 8-series is Bulldozer. And if that's a flop, your next build will likely be Intel anyway. Which leaves the M5A99X EVO the dubious honour of being a good motherboard – but for reasons beyond its control you may not wish to buy it yet.

This board feels really well made and comes with all the connectors and expansion options that you could want. There has been lots of debate about x8 versus x16 graphics card expansion slots. Most of them conclude that the extra bandwidth makes very little difference if any. I tend to agree with this position. When you take into account all of the other features of this board this one drawback really doesn’t make a lot of difference. With this being offered at the current price of 155 dollars you really can’t go wrong. Not to mention you have the outstanding company of Asus standing behind it with a 3 year warranty. For this price, performance and features this is definitely an Editor’s Choice here at Motherboards.org.

After spending several days with the ASUS M5A99X EVO, we walked away feeling quite impressed. Although there is a significant jump in pricing from the M5A97 EVO to the M5A99X EVO, we found that cost is nearly justified, for several reasons, but we're not sure if there is $60 worth of extras. First of all, the extra PCIe expansion and SATA connectivity options stand out, and the lowered overall power consumption adds some as well. We noticed better performance in nearly every benchmark too, and we cannot forget one of the biggest added options: NVIDIA SLI support on the AMD chipset. All in all, the ASUS M5A99X EVO truly is an evolution in product design; an evolution in the right direction, without a doubt. However, if you know without a doubt that you will use the board only for single-GPU use, then the AMD 970 based ASUS M5A97 EVO is probably good enough. It is roughly $40 cheaper, is missing the multi-GPU features and two SATA 3 Gbps ports, yet comes with essentially the same BIOS and software.