Main Board
There is a bit more going on with this board than the Intel 115x with extra RAM slots, a larger socket area and more USB 3.0 and SATA headers.
The X99S Gaming 7 has 2 USB 3.0 internal headers and a whopping 10 SATA ports plus the SAS controller and M.2 SSD connection to connect an onboard SSD. Keep in mind that you can’t use all of these SATA ports at once but the connectivity is awesome. We also see the power on, reset and OC Genie buttons down the bottom which can be handy for overclockers.
The cable headers such as front panel IO, Audio, 4-Pin fan, power, USB and BIOS switch are all in easy to reach places. The battery will be covered by a graphics card but it’s not hard to reset the CMOS via the rear IO button if you need to so that’s not a big deal and probably smart placement in the end. There is a switch to toggle if you are using external power to the audio solution but this is something that you should only need when initially configuring the board during installation. This external audio power switch is located near the “Audio Boost” chipset and easy to get to unless you have dual GPUs already installed.
In what is almost mandatory for a gaming board, the audio section of the PCB is lit up with an LED channel to show the isolation – we don’t care if it’s bling or genuine isolation because this board sounds great.
All up, it wasn’t hard to keep the cabling neat and we found the layout really easy to work with during our practical build in the Cooler Master Cosmos SE case. One thing we did note was that the 8-pin CPU power connector at the top of the board was further along towards the middle of the board than other (non X99) boards we’ve reviewed to date and it’s worth keeping this in mind as the cable and header can interfere with some roof mounted radiator setups.
SLI is an interesting concept here. The board is a full sized ATX but the two 16x slots are next to each other and not spread out as I’d expected. If you want a slot gap, you actually get a 2 slot gap but drop down to 8x on the second GPU because of the slot layout.
In terms of CPU coolers, we used quite a few different coolers to see how it went. The list of coolers that we used without issue were:
- Fractal Design Kelvin S24 and S36 water coolers
- Cooler Master Nepton 120XL and 240M water coolers
- Noctua NH-D15 and NH-U14S
At no point did we have clearance issues or any problems with the PWM fan profiles. The socket mounting with integrated backplate makes the X99 series boards a dream when it comes to fitting CPU coolers.
Rear IO Panel
Basically the rear IO panel shows us that there are A LOT of USB ports, the Killer LAN port, full complement of audio plugs, CMOS reset and the Gaming PS/2 connector for the ultra hardcore. There is room for WIFI in another iteration but for now we will just have to be happy to have more USB ports that we should ever need.
