Finished Looks

The ASRock X299 Gaming i9 doesn't have LEDs all over the place, although there are some around the chipset's cooler. They pulse on and off at regular intervals rather than blasting your eyes at full power 24/7. I kind of like how the light peeks out from the edge of the videocard only if you happen to be peering down at the board as it sits inside a case at your feet.


With one of the M.2 slots above the PCIe slots, you can easily put decent airflow over some of those hotter-running NVME drives that are out now, and there is plenty of room to add things like waterblocks or added heatsinks without having to worry about their height. The LEDs around the chipset cooler also illuminate the onboard buttons and the CMOS battery, which is nicely stuck at the edge of the board if you happen to be like me and decide you want to try swapping CPUs and memory kits around for several weeks in a row to see what works and what doesn't. I didn't have much luck with my 7740X and those ASUS-specific memory kits from Team Group (which wasn't really surprising, but unfortunate) with some of the first BIOS releases, but that was fortunately rectified with subsequent updates.

Test System

The ASRock X299 Gaming i9 boots up with very standard Turbo profiling and a bit of a reduced BCLK, and an input voltage that was a little bit too high for my CPU at stock with the initial BIOS. That does seem to have been adjusted in v1.4 that came out just a short while ago.