Board Layout

The ASRock X299 PROFESSIONAL GAMING i9 XE is a rather simple board when you first look at it, the gray theme helping hide the large amount of functionality hidden here. The rear of the board is all black in contrast and shows a fair bit of surface-mounted stuff all over.


The socket of the ASRock X299 PROFESSIONAL GAMING i9 XE is closely confined by DIMM slots and the CPU power stages.



Those DIMM slots come in dual banks of four slots for a total of eight functional slots supporting quad-channel with capabilities for speeds of up to 4400 MHz. The full capacity support for the X299 platform is present here, ready and willing for you to stuff all that 128 GB of memory in.


PCIe expansion possibilities are present in the form of a quintet of x16 3.0 slots (configuration may change based on installed CPU) as well as several PCIe X4 m.2 ports, the first of which is between the main PCIe slots and the CPU socket.


There are two more PCIe 3.0 x4-linked M.2 ports here, making for a total of three for you to use.


The rear I/O panel carries eight USB ports (in various flavors), a PS/2 combo port, BIOS Flashback and Clear CMOS buttons, and audio ports (optical audio most definitely included, too!). As if that wasn't enough, we have not one, not two, but THREE LAN ports. Two are powered by Intel controllers, while the third is pushed via an Aquantia 10G LAN controller. 10 SATA 6 Gbps ports are found on the board's right edge.


Here are those Intel LAN controllers; the ever-popular I219V and I211AT controllers are found on numerous motherboards from every brand.


The board's bottom edge carries quite a few pin headers; RGB LED pins and TPMS connectors are both on the left side, along with traditional front-panel audio pins. The right side has USB, front panel headers, some buttons, the CMOS battery, a couple of fan headers AND a POST display. Don't forget that other header... for the BIOS? There's so much here even the writing on the board makes it hard to figure out which is which!