Pch and vrm are good on this board!
About u.2, i cant test, have no u.2 devices:-)
On everything else, you have right!
I dont think that a board itself failure,
1. The aqc107 10gbe chip, thats the only one existing onboard solution i believe, and asus taked it in, to have 10gbe for marketing, because that 10gbe is useless (packet drops) for 10gbe, on 1gbe its working good (at least on my own tests), but again, i compared some aqc107 based controllers on an asrock mainboards/asus card/imac pro, only the imac pro works for 10gbe but has a different firmware on that chip.
So for my eyes, its not an asus fault, asus just put something in for marketing, thats the only fault i see.
2. For VRM, there are no issues at all... And im using liquid cooling... (Like anyone else here, i believe:-) )
3. The m.2 slot under that crappy cover, why are you using this slot at all??? That slot is laned to pch not to cpu... I Agree that its a crap solution under that pch heatsink (its just a plastic cover)
But thankfully we have dimm.2 connected to cpu and its working perfect... No heat issues on 1tb 960 pro...
So that m.2 pch slot is in my eyes just an optional slot, that shouldnt be used at all, only if you dont have any cpu lanes free...
4. U.2 port, dunno, but i read something here, that its not working with the intel 905 ssd, but give asus time to fix that with a bios update... (Or intel where all oem's get the bios from and customize it with their own uefi gui...)
5. XMP: Yes, i have gskill 4x16gb 3600 kit... And xmp, doesnt boot, max i can get out of them is 3200 (and its not stable) it doesnt matter how much voltage i give the ram, i cant run them at 3600 on any voltage...
But again, i dont know if its a blame for asus, intel or i get just **** from gskill.
But tests are comming, i have other x299 mobos here, just need to swap the ram, im just to lazy:-))
But i will see finally which company i need to bash then xD
6. PCH: Dont have any problems at all here...
7. Freezes (only with unstable ram clocks or unstable cpu clocks), im running cpu on 4,7ghz (not delidded, the temperatures are over 100 C, on 4,8 thats why im on 4,7) (7900x)
Ram (4x16gb 3600mhz gskill) is running at 3000mhz, everything above is unstable, voltages doesnt matter at all.
Cache is running at 2800mhz, and its stable! Never tryed to go above 2,8ghz.
8. Bluetooth, oh man, read my bluetooth thread... But absolutely with you.
In Short: Bluetooth stopped working, wifi still worked (same chip), in bios they was turned on...
At that time, i seen my bluetooth devices but only their mac adress, not their names. Connecting to them didnt worked at all...
So i thinked it was a windows problem... Reinstalled windows, didnt helped. Booted ubuntu, bluetooth still didnt worked... One week gone, and i finally tested it again, for last time, before i wanted to order an intel 9260ngf card... And you know what, blueetoth worked again...
I did nothing, just tested it last time before ordering... And hell, i believed it was dead, but it strangely started to work again... Amd i dont know why till now... But its working now perfect... Why ever...
And no, there was no windows updates... And i tryed befone 5 different driver versions... And even with ubuntu... And yes, i tryed ubuntu again... And its working...
Why ever that happend, i dont understand... I was 100% sure its dead...
9. Thunderbolt card, did you tryed one??? Try and your windows will get laggy, core 3 starts to work at 100%, you get acpi events flooding. Then remove that thunderbolt card, and everything is perfect again.
This is 100% confirmed, many, if not all users have that problem.
And thats clearly an asus fault, because acpi tables are done by asus.
And on this point, i just want say, please asus, make nice acpi tables, like apple do, there is no other oem aside from apple, which have good and not 1000 times splitted tables without reference failures.
Look at your tables, there are some calls to registers and methods, which are not defined at all...
10. Asus aura: Omg is that a crap, the best thing to describe this is to do a video, i can make one on request. But let me explain:
I have erp enabled for S4+S5 (sleep and shutdown), without erp things are bit better, but just a bit. But without erp the computer consumes 10W at turned off state (without activated lights) and a little bit less (8W) on sleep...
YES!!! Its unbelieveable, without erp, sleep takes less power as turned off state...
With erp enabled turned off state consumes 0,1-0,2 W and sleep state consumes 5W, so you can clearly see, why im using erp.
Ok, back to Asus Aura, hell its a crap.
1. Static lights, everything just a static color, for example blue = 0% cpu usage = 85-90W at idle (total power consumption)
2. Dynamic lights, doesnt matter which effect you choose, 2-3% cpu usage (on a 7900x, 10core at 4,7ghz, 2%!!!) That means in watts = 105-120W
20 - 30 Watts, just for the rgb effects??? Common asus, i believe this can be done much better... But thankfully static lightning, diesnt consume any cpu power...
3. Ok, lets forget about the power consumption, things get much worse.
Without erp, static lights will get saved, dunno where on the board but it persists.
With erp, static lights will get resetted to that absolutely crap rainbow animation.
Okay asus, if you save that config to nvram, and nvram gets resetted with enabled erp, the whole nvram concept is broken. So where ever you save that lights config, save it please on any persistent store, maybe to the bios chip or to nvram if its not stored there... Thats why nvram exists at all, if you dont get access to nvram through windows, you can realize that through acpi calls...
4. Now to the really bad things about aura:
Im booting my pc, the "lightning" service (aura) kicks in, my board gets blue (the static color ive choosen), the gpu gets blue too (not always but 95% of all times), 2 of 4 (gskill rgb) rams get blue, the other 2 (on the other side of the cpu) are unsynchroned rainbow..... Really?...
Ok, what im doing to fix that: Just restarting the "lightning" service and the other 2 ram sticks get blue too....
But if you open Aura and change color to red for example, the new 2 ram sticks get red and the first 2, which worked on boot are still blue...
So now the fun begins, restarting the lightning service, till the other 2 blue ram sticks gets red...
5. And the absolutely crap at all: After sleep, maybe not the first sleep, but definitive after the secound sleep... Everything reverts to rainbow... Exept for the 2 of 4 ram sticks (on one or another side of the cpu)...
Thats surely happen because of erp for S4 (sleep).
So really please fix aura, or rebuild it from ground, because in this state its just crap! Im using v 1.06.17 and i tryed already v 1.06.29 and that newer version, omg maybe its just not compatible with the board, but believe me, things get more worse.
On the first version, i think it was a combination of older aura version + older bios + older windows version, at least the ram worked perfectly i think i had no issues. But now with 1.06.17 + 1301 bios + windows 1803 (enterprise), aura is just crap.
The very very best would be, if we can set static colors in bios directly...
Dynamic effects will newer work, because it needs to get synced every second or sth like that, but static colors inside bios and the world is perfect for 50% of the users here!
And really there is enough space left on that extremely big bios chip (64mb or sth like that)
So back to the topic again, after all my cryings of aura... What i mainly will say is, not everything is a fail from asus, or a fail of the R6E...
In my opinion, the R6E is a good board, sure its not ~600€ good, there im with you, but aside from the software/bios fails, which are fixeable by updates, i have no complains.
Believe me, i have some asrock x299 mobos at the office, for our other admins, they are not better. They have all their pros/cons.
The only other thing, but thats a complain to the whole x299 plattform are the boot times, thats why im anyway using most of the time a notebook. 5s complete boot compared to 40s just for post on x299...
However, thanks for your time to reading my crap:-)
PS: I have one of the very first boards, in germany (buyed 03.august.2017) Maybe its just not a good sample or sth like that.
Cheers:-)