The Art Of (High-End) Subtlety

We paired ASUS’ HEDT ROG Strix X299-E Gaming motherboard with Intel’s latest Core i7-7800X Skylake-X CPU to see how they fare in this Lab Exam.

- John Law

With Intel’s new Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors now out and about, the corresponding X299 chipset followed soon after. The new chipset signaled the arrival of a new generation of HEDT (High-End Desktop) motherboards, and soon after, Intel’s AiB partners released their own variants of X299 motherboards onto the market.

Out of all the motherboard brands that have gone on the production offensive, ASUS is the one brand that is at the forefront of this new enthusiast grade motherboard. Not so much for its innovative designs, mind you, but more because of the sheer number of X299-ready motherboards that the brand has to offer.

In this Lab Exam, we’ll be taking a deeper look at the ROG Strix X299-E Gaming, one of ASUS’ more gaming centric, enthusiast-level motherboards, and see if it is worthy of consideration.

A motherboard for the gamers

Originally announced at COMPUTEX 2017, the ROG Strix X299-E Gaming is one of many high-performance motherboards that the company has in store for the informed consumers and PC hobbyists.

In total, ASUS announced seven motherboards at a special workshop during the week-long ICT trade show, ranging from the Prime series, all the way down to the ROG Rampage VI series X299 motherboards.

By comparison, the ROG Strix X299-E Gaming is the more affordable model of the lot, so PC gaming enthusiasts should take note if they don’t want to spend a large chunk of their budget on the motherboard. It should also be pointed out that the reason the board is considerably less costly than ASUS’ other X299 boards is because the board doesn’t come with as many features as its siblings, and definitely less of the ‘bling’ that peppers the other boards. In a sense, it’s an LGA 2066 ATX motherboard (the majority are E-ATX) with just the most bare essentials.