ASUS X99 E WS vs ASUS Rampage V Extreme

I would get the Rampage V Extreme because it has the Asus OC socket, which is supposedly a better 2011 socket with more pins activated which is supposed to give a more stable overclock. Also you can liquid cool the VRMs as well.

You are right. All Asus X99 motherboards have OC Socket.

The X99-E WS board is aimed at power users rather than OCers or gamers, though its nearly as capable in those regards.

It has higher quality capacitors.

The PLX chips onboard give you the extra PCI-Lanes. They are only helpful if you are using a 5820k and want to do SLI, or if you plan to do 4-way SLI.

The sound card probably isn't as good, since they've used capacitors that are more durable, but not specific to audio. The ethernet capabilities should be about the same, or better.

I'd say get the board that appeals to you more. At this level the quality differences probably aren't great. Get the X99-E WS if you consider yourself a power user who wants a system to last for as long as possible, and give as much flexibility as possible.

Get the RVE if you want absolute best possible chance to get the highest overclock.

If your worried about the newegg reviews, go buy it in person and have them examine the pins on the board.
Also buy a Intel Overclocking Warranty, they aren't expensive.
http://click.intel.com/tuningplan/

I have asus x99 - I dont know if i would call myself a 'power user'

Asus X99-E WS board over any other board for ultra workstation builds; planning for ten X99 builds (5960X and Xeon E5 v3s) in the holiday season. I'm awaiting Maxwell based Quadro and Tesla cards, also hope there will be a Maxwell based Titan Black (II) model.

Perhaps, folks should compare Asus X99-E WS with Asrock X99 WS due to $200 difference? I'm somewhat tempted to try one Asrock WS board (never bought one from them in that series).

Yes, zero-gaming!

Hi LJ,

Your post got my attention because your use (Adobe CC Aps) matches mine. I need an upgrade to my current hardware to get better performance for video editing, but I also use Photoshop a lot and want support for 10 bit color depth. After looking at packaged solutions for a while, I'm thinking about taking the DIY plunge for the first time.

The ASUS X99 boards look interesting, but all the poor New Egg reviews have me a bit worried about whether the problems and trouble shooting will be over my head. I've looked around the ROG forum and it seems like an excellent resource for Rampage V information.

Your points about Rampage V vs. WS were helpful to me because while I have no interest in gaming, I don't mind having a gaming MOBO if it will do what I need.

I have a couple of questions for you:

1. Are you planning to overclock for your CC apps? If so, where will it help you?

2. Do you have any thoughts on i7 5960 vs. 5930 for CC or video editing apps? I'm using Sony Vegas Pro right now, but might switch to Premier Pro at some point. I'd prefer not to spend $1k for a CPU if it isn't going to make a significant difference in rendering speed.

2. UPDATE: I found the Intel Core i7-5960X, -5930K And -5820K CPU Review, which seems to show little benefit to the 5960 in this application. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5960x-haswell-e-cpu,3918.html

3. Your thoughts on a GPU? I'm currently using NVIDIA K2000D, which does a great job with image processing, but may not be the best choice for video editing.

I'll be interested to hear an update about your build, with more detail about the hardware and reasons for choosing it.

Thanks,

VGD

Hi VGD,
The 8 cores on the 5960 are overkill most would argue and its flipping expensive. The 5930 however is unlocked and can be easily/painlessly overclocked using a good Mobo [RVE]. I considered the 5960 but then found this:

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Core-i7-5960X-vs-4960X-Performance-Comparison-588/

Matt Bach does some superb unbiased reviews and uses real-life comparisons, not the theoretical test bench stuff. On Adobe Apps, he seems pretty adamant that the 5930 would serve us well. The 5960 he also holds in high regard but more wrt future proofing and for heavy calculation purposes.

I use Adobe PremPro CC [subscription] and I simply can't fault it. It also makes full use of all cores but I think 8 cores could be over the top at this stage.
So, I went with the 5930 and it hasn't disappointed. Coupled that with twin GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon’s. These two are not really utilised in PS but PremPro likes them a lot when rendering etc. I know the 780 Poseidon’s have been superseded but they have a very fast bandwidth, which is important to prevent bottlenecks and if you look around you can get some good deals at the moment, sub £300 in the UK, they have been as high as £470. Quadros I wouldn't entertain. They are well over priced and underperform GTX's by a wide margin. Only really desirable if you want to use an expensive 10 bit monitor. They only reason Adobe extol their virtues is that Asus are pushing these along with Tesla cards as the perfect high end combination for pro use.

Still building my rig and anticipate costs will be in the order of £4k in total but hey, it’s an investment and will last for many years to come and upgradable.

Have a look at this site for tips from the Pros wrt video editing:

http://ppbm7.com/index.php/news

It’s a year or so out of date but still highly regarded.

Hope that helps.

LJ
Ps. I'm an enthusiast by the way, wouldn't call myslef a Pro by any means. BUT I do have a serious IT background behind me: Unix/TNS Admin and the like.

Hi LJ,

Thanks for the link to Puget Systems. Pretty good stuff there. I’m virtually certain that I’ll follow your lead with the 5930. I’m also leaning toward the RVE over either the Deluxe or WS. You mentioned that the RVE is specifically tuned to the Intel i7 5XXX CPU’s, where the WS is not. I’m curious to know where you found that information. I haven’t stumbled across it yet.

I’m still considering the GPU situation. I have a pair of 10 bit monitors and, connected via DP to the Quadro, I get very smooth 10 bit grayscale and color for my Photoshop work. I’m reluctant to give that up, but the upper end of the Quadro line is priced annoyingly high and, as you say, they underperform the GTX’s in many respects.

In thinking it through, I may just keep the 5 year old Alienware Aurora with the Quadro K2000D that I’m using now for Photoshop and do a new build for everything else, including video editing. I keep all my files on a Synology NAS box set up as a RAID5, so image or video files would be accessible on either machine.

That leaves me free to consider a GPU for video editing independently from static image processing. You mentioned that you’re using a pair of GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon’s. From my limited reading, I got the impression that multiple GPU’s are more useful for gaming and 3-D rendering than video editing. Do you find differently?

I’m thinking that I’ll start with a single GPU and decide later whether to add a second. The GTX 980’s look pretty interesting, but I have no idea whether their capabilities would be wasted on video editing. Perhaps the 970’s are sufficient. Have you looked into either of these?

Another thing on my mind is the OS. I’m using Windows 7 Pro now and, for my purposes, I see little reason to change to Windows 8.1. Your thoughts?

Like you, I’m an enthusiast, not a pro when it comes to image processing and video editing. Unlike you, I have no IT background, so I have to work fairly diligently to make sense of the available hardware and software.

Thanks again for your help,

VGD

I honestly can't recall where I've seen the comment about the RVE being tuned specifically to I7 5's but if you think about it, the RVE is primarily aimed at OCers who want to break records. They don't care about Xeons or loads of storage etc, they just want to stretch the limits and that's where the tuning and ROG aspects come in. However this also means that ASUS see this a lucrative market and will need to keep that edge i.e. they can't afford to drop the ball on this kind of high end kit.

Also have to keep in mind that all 3 of their X99 boards are high-end, not middle to mainstream. So you can expect some high prices to follow and to be matched with top end performance. The WS board [in my opinion] is really for pros who want a rig that can run very fast and complicated calculations, handle high demand 3D rendering [3dsMax,Maya] and the like. Also run 24hrs, day in day out. I don’t need that type of extravagance.

The RVE has some facilities I will never use, like the OC Panel. I seriously wouldn’t know what to do with it! However the board is built like a tank and has some seriously good hardware fixed to it.

If you are talking two 10 bit monitors, then you need the Quadro. I believe that you can use a separate GTX GPU on the same board [for the Cuda cores] but I can’t prove that one way or the other. Eric in the Adobe Hardware Forums, often states this is possible and he seems to be a guru in these matters.

Hope that helps.

I’ve dismantled my build at the moment and trying to figure out the best way to run the cooling loops. I guess it will be a couple of months before I’m up and running again.

LJ

There is a lot of good points here.

X99 - Da Dual LAN though:
Dual LAN
Reliability
"Pro Cool" capacitors = Lower temps
4 way SLI = Quad Crossfire - 4 way X16
VRMs are better

Rampage 5:
Higher Temps
3 way SLI = Triple Crossfire = X16 by X8 by X8
Reliability

One thing needs to be made perfectly clear here [in my opinion]. Asus X99 boards, wrt to the current thread, are very high end and all top performers. This includes the Deluxe, WS and Rampage. As to whether they are suitable for you or not is down to usage. Certainly on the top two [WS & Rampage], there will be Pros and Cons and you have to make a subjective judgement based on your requirements.
You can't really go wrong at this level. The only area for me that is pretty well defined, is where the CPU is involved. The 5930 is fast and an excellent choice for the bulk of people, again, in my opinion. The 5960 is a monster for those wishing to indulge. However I've researched this a good deal and it seems that if you are heavily involved in 3D animation, professional video editing, analysis etc and you prepared to overclock it a bit, say 4Ghz, then it's a godsend for you. But for me, a waste of money as I wouldn't realize any benefits.

Future proof for how long? What do you want to do with it? Why would you need all those sata ports? It looks like a nice board if you need a work station with a ton of drives, but really why would you need a ton of drives, in a few years you may want to pop in a few 2GB SSDs (remember in SSD land higher density generally gets you some improved performance). So unless you have a need for a ton of storage that board looks like over kill. I do have a ton of storage, but it's external to my PC as it holds my video collection, it's more convenient and once I fill up a drive I'm through writing to it and actually run it at USB2 speeds since that's all that's needed for play back (using a small low power media player rather than my PC). As for the m.2 slots, I think that may be less relevant as pcie SSD gets going...but a lot depends on how you plan on using the pcie slots.

For overclocking some people think the ASUS overclock socket has an advantage over the other boards for stability, you might want to check that out. The ASrock won't have that.

For me I'm looking at the rampage 5 because it's pci slot configuration looks good for me, I can put in two video cards in slots 1 and 2 (x16, x8 fine for my 4k monitor) and use a riser card to get access to slot 3 bring out x2 for a PCI 3.1 card (when they become useful) this kills the SATA express but I have no need for that. Then I can put a USB 3 card in the x1 slot for backwards compatibility with some old USB 2 devices if necessary (x99 has problems with some old USB stuff this would be the best workaround for my purposes though a powered USB 2 hub can do the job if you don't mind turning the devices off separately then wait until windows is booted before you turn them on) a pcie x4 SSD in slot 4 and either another pcie x4 in slot 6 or use the m.2 (probably skip the m.2 I have a 1GB SATA ssd now and so I can wait for some nice fast pcie ssds to hit the market later this year). Note that the latest Rampage BIOS supports NVMe so we know this board supports it for sure... hopefully NVMe will be available on pcie ssds (including M.2) coming out by mid year. Another possibility especially if the usb3 board is not needed would be the same graphics above and in a few years a couple of x8 SSD in slots 4 and 6 (these are in the server market now so I would not be surprised to see them in consumer market in a few years at reasonable prices with top speed)...that would fill all 40 lanes so no USB 3.1 (if I was really interested in USB 3.1 I'd probably wait until it's integrated on the high end motherboards rather than using a pcie socket and with a couple of type c connectors but if you want 4x SLI where are you going to get the x2 lanes for usb 3.1 anyway?)

I thought I was future proofed with my sandy bridge until one of my x16 slots cracked and I lost my SLI, oh well hopefully I'll have better luck with the new build. I'll still use the sandy for a backup PC using it's on board graphics, if it wasn't for the loss of SLI it would be good for another year or two.

I hope my new x99 keeps me going for 6 years or so with an upgrade to some faster video cards (I have 770s now) in year or two ideally maybe a pair that have 2 GPUs on each as 4k gaming catches on. Also given the cost of RAM I'm just going with a 16GB kit for now when the prices (and latencies hopefully) of DDR4 come down I toss those and get a 64GB kit (mixing kits is not recommended so getting 32GB now and adding 32GB later is a no go) though if money was no object I'd just go 64GB now and be done with it.

One other option would be to go with a cheap x99 board now and wait for the second gen x99 boards which will probably correct some of the short comings of the current generation (like lack of PCI lane switching in most of them). Of course given the high price of cheap x99s this doesn't seem appealing to me but then I'm on a budget. Also at my age building systems is getting a bit tiring I'd just rather build one now and have done with it (I used to build and sell custom PC's/LANs and repair PCs...anyone remember lantastic?).

The trouble is with only 40 lanes if you take them all with graphics you aren't going to get m.2. Your configuration would need 64 lanes. Even the one x99 board with lane switching I know of the mpower x99s suffers from this problem if you try 4way sli the m.2 become pci 2.0 2 lane. How many 4k monitors are you running anyway that you need all those lanes for graphics?

First off you might want to check this out, while it's talking Sandy Bridge E it's a pretty good discussion and helps explain why x16,x8...x8 work pretty well http://www.enthusiastpc.net/articles/00003/

But you would need a motherboard with pci3.0 switch to get tri or more x16 and I'm not sure such a chip exists.

As for sound I've read that many people feel the on board sound matches the pcie sound cards and the only way to get better sound (for professionals) is to go with an external solution. Me I'm happy with the sound that comes though the displayport (HDMI sound) so I'm not very critical about it. I'd sure try the onboard sound first as again most people seem to find it excellent.

You might look at the Asus x99 deluxe as it's more oriented to 4x sli than the rampage for about the same price, but like all the current x99 boards if you fill it with graphics cards then you will run out of lanes for anything else even the m.2 (the mpower above being an exception but it's m.2 will still work albeit more slowly). Maybe consider sli with two two gpu cards, that would be very fast and still let you have 8 lanes for other stuff.

The only other thing I can think of is to get a dual xeon motherboard and put two 40 lane xeons in it which will give you 80 lanes, plenty for 4x x16 plus 16 lanes left over but that is going to be some serious $$$ not to mention the xeons run at slower clocks and most can't be over clocked.

3D rendering video editing with xeon-Tesla -adobe application usage go for WS beeter performance and reliabilty with STORAGE options professional usage.
Casual usage for video editing and more for mulititask and maxout gaming performanece usage use RIVE

I dont have board that has both world performance so far this is my 2 cents advice.

I went with:

CPU: i7 5960x
MOBO: X99 deluxe
RAM: 8x8gb 2666 Gskill RipJaws
GPU: Sapphire Vapor-X 290 8gb
Cooler: Corsair h110i

The deluxe compared to the WS however does not have X16 in all four SLI which is the key difference. In this case you really don't need it. But da Dual LAN though?

I will say, if you get an X99 WS board, it is SSI CEB. Only 4 cases support that

That is the "default" these days. It is supported by a lot more than four.

Well not 4, but they do get expensive.

http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/case/#f=13