Back in our launch review of fifteen Intel X99 motherboards for Haswell-E processors we weren't entirely sure about the purpose of ASUS' OC Socket, which contains more pins than the sockets other manufacturers incorporate in their boards. Haswell-E processors do indeed have more than 2011 contact points, a number of which are not actually used in the official socket. For the time being, Intel appears to be unable or unwilling to tell us why this is the case. Initially, ASUS was also unable to prove the claim that the additional pins can be used to deliver additional and more stable power.

During the tests for our upcoming Haswell-E OC workshop, we couldn't help but notice that the uncore, which includes functions such as the L3 cache and the memory controller, could be overclocked further on ASUS boards than on motherboards that are produced by manufacturers such as Gigabyte and MSI. This had a clear effect on memory performance. In the image below, you can see that memory performance is substantially improved when we increase the uncore frequency from 3 GHz to 4 GHz. The other settings are identical: a Core i7 5960X clocked at 4.5 GHz and DDR4 memory clocked at 3,000 MHz with identical timings. In the most favourable scenarios, the maximum speed of both the L3 cache and the memory is increased by some 30 percent.