ASUS Prime X299-Deluxe II X299 Motherboard LGA2066 (Intel Core X-Series) ATX DDR4 M.2 U.2 Thunderbolt 3 USB 3.1 with Dual Gigabit LAN and 802.11AC WiFi

This is the third of their X299 boards, really does the job. 8 SATA connectors, I have a 5x4tb drive Raid 5 plus a 3x1tb SSD Raid 0. Has 3 M.2 NVME's built on the motherboard, I have a 1tb in each, the one standing up in the picture has a mount I haven't installed yet. It comes with the cables and screws, however there are so many different things to do with this motherboard you have a tough time sorting and finding what you need for the particular build. I used the Corsair Obsidian case which did the same things, gave me 5x what I needed in cabled and parts. It does come with a daughterboard which I took a picture of, allows you to have 3 temperature probes plus the one temperature probe on the motherboard for a total of 4. Incidentally the case came with 4 also and it's own board. The daughter board powers fans, the mother board has plenty, plus for the CPU it has 2x CPU Fan connectors, and 2x Pump pump connectors, then on the bottom of the board is a higher power pump connector. There's a lot, you can do a lot with this board. The thunderbolt 3 I didn't get work as I wanted, reviews say you can plug in your displayport FROM your video card into the Displayport IN in the back, then using the thunderbolt 3 connection split that video into multiple outputs, I couldn't get it to work however could do a single video out. You have two Displayport IN, those are not outputs. Plenty of USB 3.1, plenty of everything. It uses the Intel Rapid Storage Technology, , RST or IRST, confusingly it looks like you have to pay for it but it's not, it's free you just turn it on in the bios then boot and it's there. You can see how I configured the drives in the picture, super easy and it's super fast. You can use one of your M.2 for an optane drive and use that to speed it up, but I would rather have 3x 1tb NVME drives and just use them for cache storage I set up. It supports the Aura but you can't see it because the case fans cover up the lights in the back and the ones in the middle of the motherboard are covered by the graphics card, that has to be there. The qcode and the screen, and the 4 lights that tell you status, plus the on motherboard bios flashing without boot, plus power and reset buttons, all huge plusses when doing the buildout.

This was the main part of a new computer build for my recording studio. What a huge step up from the older MSI board I was using. Everything about this product exceeded my expectations. ASUS rocks! A neat side-effect of this install was the built-in WIFI adapter. Initially I was running the system without the included WIFI extender antenna and getting fairly lame performance. I decided to attach the antenna almost as a last resort and the download speed jumped from around 40mbps to over 200mbps (I use Comcast service at 200mbps option). It was like winning the WIFI lottery lolol. Don't need the ethernet cable anymore.With a new M.2 drive as my OS drive, Windows 10 Pro boots up in like 10 seconds. It takes the BIOS longer to load than Windows. Amazing. As a recording machine (DAW), it's absolutely fabulous. I'm not a gamer so much of the gaming aspects of this product are lost on me but as a studio recording platform... I'm in heaven. Thanks ASUS and Amazon!

This turned out to be a really good motherboard, but ASUS support is, I mean, really bad. I had multiple terminal crashes while surfing a few websites. ASUS support literally told me “its Windows and Windows crashes all the time.” After multiple reinstalls of Windows and setting up my build, I figured out the ASUS Q installer didn’t have a driver for the second Ethernet port which is 5g. I wasn’t even using it yet, but it was a missing driver. I went through the drivers in my ASUS account and found one - in the middle of a total list of current and legacy drivers. After that, I haven’t had a single crash in 3 weeks. I like my computer, but ASUS is horribly unorganized and the support specialists didn’t speak English well enough to make other instructions - which need to be precise - understandable in the right order. Follow-ups by supervisors showed no interest in updating the installer.

Started with known working pc. Wanted to upgrade for the dual thunderbolt DP in onboard.-First board code: 00, seems a lot of people had this happen so I got a second board.-Second board didnt even cycle.You plug it in, all the fancy lights turn on and the oled fires up and you press the power button (because you have nothing else hooked up in testing mode) and nada. Not even an error.All components back in original computers with gigabyte board and writing this review.... So yeah... Confirmed asus bad QA these days. Believe the hype.Amazon at least is being cool about it. First return is on the house, second one was 6 bucks with the pre-lable. Price of doing business. Thanks for not making me deal directly with asus.