Closer Look / Product Photos
The X299 Professional Gaming i9 comes in a typical for ASRock, large box. The main features are described on the back of the box and everything looks aesthetic. I like the fact that on the front of the box there is not much info. There is large product name with XE in the center and that’s all. Most users who are buying motherboards already know what is inside so they don’t really need full specification and various logos on every side of the box.
Inside the box is pretty much everything we may need for installation. There are manuals, drivers, WiFi antennas, M.2 screws, SATA cables, SLI bridges and I/O shield.
The Professional i9 XE is ASRocks highest motherboard and the most expensive. It’s really well equipped and I don’t think that any competitive motherboard offers more. We can find three NIC – two are 1GBit and one is 10Gbit. Teaming is, of course, working on all of them as long as operating system supports it. On Windows 10 will be required drivers and manufacturer software to make it work.
There is also dual-band WiFi controller, high-quality audio, multiple USB 3.1 ports and various headers for more ports.
The M.2 sockets support VROC but I won’t hide it’s not so well designed technology (because of Intel, not ASRock) so spending additional money on VROC hardware key is not the best idea. Without the key, we can create volumes in Windows storage manager what for some reason gives better results than VROC but the array won’t be bootable. I guess it’s still a good option if we need really fast storage for games or other programs while OS can be installed on SATA SSD.
We can expect that VROC will work fine as long as we use PCIe card ( like ASRock ULTRA QUAD M.2 ) or when we use drives connected via U.2 port. It’s an additional cost but to be honest, if anyone can afford HEDT PC with multiple NVMe SSD then the additional card is not so big problem.
For sure all users will be happy with power delivery on the X299 Professional i9 XE. 13, well-cooled power phases and dual 8-pin power connectors are enough for overclocking of every Skylake-X processor.
There are many other features which are on the list and I could continue but I guess that quick look at the specifications and features list says enough. I will still tell you some more about a couple of interesting things on the next pages of this review.
