This is going to sound a little silly, but I this $500 motherboard actually solved most
of the issues I was having with my Intel X299 workstation.
Today we’ll be talking about the ASUS X299 WS SAGE motherboard and why it was a worthy
upgrade for my workstation rig, right after this.
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Disclosure time: I bought this motherboard myself.
Wasn’t free, am not being paid to say this, was a significant dent in my wallet.
Easy peasy.
When I got my Intel Core i9-7980XE processor from Intel, it came with a Gigabyte Aorus
Gaming 7 X299 motherboard.
I’ve only used one or two Gigabyte motherboards in the past and didn’t particularly like
them, but I didn’t see much problem with it.
And to be fair to Gigabyte - this motherboard would, generally, be fine if someone was building
a X299 gaming rig.
But I quickly ran into some limitations with it.
I had two major issues with the Gigabyte gaming motherboard, along with the obnoxious coil
whine it developed over the past year.
Firstly, I kept seemingly bottlenecking my PCIe bandwidth.
The 7980XE has 44 lanes, and I was trying to use all of them, and it wasn’t working
out.
My 10 gigabit NIC seemingly got bottlenecked at times, my NVMe storage drives had VERY
poor performance - we’re talking 200MB/s on an Intel 750 Series drive on a good day,
and sometimes capture cards would act up.
Plus, I just didn’t have enough slots in the first place.
Secondly, the USB chipset on this motherboard seemed to be weak.
I ran into similar issues moving from my AMD FX build on the glorious ASUS Crosshair V
Formula-Z motherboard, which had lots of ports and could handle all of my USB devices to
my X99 build with the ASUS X99-A II.
My hub kept disconnecting, devices disconnected or lost power, etc.
I eventually found a slimmed down configuration that worked, and then that setup ran into
USB issues on my X299 Aorus gaming 7.
There were few on-board ports so I HAD to rely on a hub, plugging in new devices would
frequently disconnect all devices, and sometimes USB devices would randomly lose connection.
Both of these are… me.
I build powerhouse workstations and put them to serious work.
I use a lot of expansion cards and a lot of USB devices.
And I’d expect an HEDT platform like X99 and X299 to support such a workflow.
Turns out it can.
I researched for a while and finally splurged and spend a whopping 500 bucks on my first
real “workstation” board.
The ASUS X299 WS SAGE.
I’ve heard nothing but good things about ASUS’s WS line of boards and this one seemed
to be perfect.
It ticked all of my boxes - more PCIe slots, seemingly better handling of PCIe lanes and
bandwidth, 2 M.2 slots, 8 RAM slots, a front panel USB 3.1 Gen 2 type C header, RGB - though
that didn’t work out - and LOTS of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, along with a 3.1 Gen 2 Type
A port and Type C port on the back IO.
And a nice clean audio chipset.
Installing it was a tight fit, and I later learned that somehow upon my first insertion
of my USB 3.0 front panel connector I bent one of the header pins on the board and then
later broke it off trying to fix it, so that sucks, but it worked!
It’s got some very uncomfortable fan header placement, with one being bent up by my GPU,
and I didn’t have another CableMod sleeved PCIe power cable to run to the power header
on the board.
Also, the addition of that extra PCIe slot at the top makes everything else a tight fit.
The RAM slots are right on top of the GPU, which meant I couldn’t install the custom
backplate I had ordered, but that’s fine - it went in my gaming rig.
Also, the IO shield is spaced far enough away from the IO that some USB C cables struggle
to stay plugged in the back, which kind of sucks.
And my originally-Gigabyte-chosen 5-pin RGB strip no longer works with the motherboard
and I cannot find an adapter.
So it’s not perfect, BUT the important part is those juicy PCIe lanes and USB ports.
I’ve had none of those issues with USB on this board, and I actually get to plug in
MORE stuff again, which is fantastic.
I was, eventually, able to optimize my fan curve to keep things nice and cool, get a
RAM overclock stable the first try that the gaming motherboard flat out would not post
with, and I can overclock my 7980XE to hell and back, only limited by cooling that little
oven.
And PCIe lanes are good, too.
I keep my GTX 1080ti, a 10 gigabit NIC, Intel 750 Series NVMe SSD, and a 4K60 capture card
in the rig at most times, and I still have slots available.
I will be adding in a USB 3.0 card that gives me a replacement front header soon, too.
My Intel 750 SSD is now back up to full speed.
My M.2 drives haven’t really improved performance much - but that’s because they’re both
ran through the chipset with a single 4x speed link - that seems to be how all Intel chipsets
are at the moment, from what I’ve been able to glean from watching Wendell’s motherboard
coverage over at Level1Techs.
I wound up giving myself way more headache trying to do a cooler swap as I’ll show
in a future video, but otherwise, this $500 motherboard has basically solved all of my
problems with my X299 rig.
The only thing left would be to delid my 7980XE, which I don’t think I’m going to be doing
anytime soon.
If you want to buy this motherboard, or the recently-released new version of it with less
USB ports but 10 gigabit NICs onboard, affiliate product links will be in the description below.
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I’m EposVox and I’ll see you next time.