Test System

Initial Setup

ASRock was ever so gracious to provide me with a CPU for testing the X99E-ITX/ac, so I promptly slapped that CPU and some of my trusty G.Skill DDR4 into the board, and with a plan in mind, grabbed my ASRock M8 PC and got ready to make a swap. I've been using the M8 for some time now, and it has proven itself to be a pretty trusty little box worthy of a tech upgrade. But we can stop talking about that now since the PSU's cables weren't long enough, which doesn't have ANYTHING at all to do with the X99E-ITX/ac other than, well, that I wish I could have put mine into the M8 since doing so just makes sense. Here you have what would be a drop-in upgrade for more cores, more bandwidth, and faster driver technology in SATA Express and USB 3.1, heatsink included, and it all got foiled by a 24-pin cable.


At the same time, my dilemma also gives you an idea of what we truly have here with the ASRock X99E-ITX/ac—a small board that is pretty killer, with its own tiny little heatsink included. That heatsink is all cute and friendly, rubbing up against the memory a little bit, maybe being a little too friendly, but that's OK. On the other side is a HUGE expanse of space, right where an M.2 drive or a couple drive plugs would be. I'm just moving on here and ignoring the fan rubbing against the heatsink as I'll talk about the cooler a bit more in the conclusion. It's important, but only if you've really read on this far, and I suppose if you read this much, you'll read the rest, too. ;)


There not much else to say at this point. The board works, and works well, so I didn't run into any problems while getting it up and running, or during testing. There's a boost to CPU_NB speeds, easily done since there is a lack of DRAM channels that have to be pushed, which improves performance a little bit. Since this isn't your standard board, how it runs might not exactly be perfectly "standard" either. After all, the X99E-ITX/ac is a bit limited in PCIe, contrary to what X99 offers in the first place.