ASUS Shows Off Special Intel LGA2011-3 Socket With More CPU Pins!
Did you know that the ASUS ROG Rampage V Extreme, ASUS X99-Deluxe, ASUS X99-Pro and ASUS X99-A feature LGA2011-3 sockets? If you are an enthusiast you likely did, but did you know that ASUS went with a unique patent-pending OC Socket that has extra pins for extra performance? We weren’t aware of that before Haswell-E launched, but it appears that ASUS added even more pins to provide more performance! Adding more pins won’t do anything if the processor doesn’t have pads on them, but it turns out that Intel Haswell-E processors (Intel Core i7-5960X, 5930X and 5280K) were made with extra pins on them that the reference LGA2011-3 socket design doesn’t use. Take a look below to see what we are talking about.
It appears that ASUS has added 39 additional pins and that this allows them to improve the stability and reliability of the Intel Haswell-E processors being used in the socket by virtually eliminating voltage drop (vDrop). This also leads to better overclocking results and ASUS claims this is one of the reasons their boards overclock better than the competition.
The cool thing about the ASUS OC Socket is that if you are not overclocking or tweaking voltages in the BIOS, the additional pins in the OC Socket do not activate. Once you take an ASUS or ROG board and start overclocking the extra pins help smooth out power delivery and the UEFI BIOS allows for find tuning of each individual CPU core.
ASUS says that you are able to get higher CPU and DDR4 memory overclocks on their Intel X99 platforms since you are able to run higher frequencies at lower voltages since you are actually running the voltage at what you set it to in the UEFI BIOS. ASUS showed this off one one of their boards with the ASUS OC socket enabled and disabled with the CPU voltage set to 1.825V on an Intel Core i7-5820K processor. With the ASUS OC socket they were getting an actual 1.824V at the socket versus 1.728V on the Intel LGA2011-v3 reference socket. Pretty cool stuff and something worth noting to those looking to build an X99 system.