Layout

At a first glance the ASUS Maximus VIII Hero looks very good with its harmonic design. For the first time in quite a few years ASUS has decided to change the color scheme of their ROG series motherboards. There is a matte black PCB and the heatsinks feature a metallic, dark silver tone, which reflects different colors. The layout itself is well-designed and there is plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are angled SATA connectors allows an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.

The ASUS Maximus VIII Hero features a digital 10+2 phase power design. The CPU is backed up by ten phases, while the memory can rely on two, so there is a stable current supply in any case. Furthermore ASUS equips this board with their so called "BlackWing Chokes". Furthermore those chokes can cope with up to 60A per phase. Additionally there are 10K Black Metallic Capacitors, which have an average life span of 10'000 hours. The power design is overall more than powerful enough to easily deal with extreme overclocking.

There are four DIMM-slots on the Maximus VIII Hero. Officially supported are DDR4 3800 (O.C) / 3733 (O.C.) / 3600 (O.C.) / 3500 (O.C.) /3466 (O.C) / 3400 (O.C.) / 3333 (O.C.) / 3300 (O.C.) / 3200 (O.C.) / 3000 (O.C.) / 2800 (O.C.) / 2666 (O.C.) / 2400 (O.C.) / 2133.There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you won't encounter compatibility issues with large coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported is Xtreme Memory Profile (XMP) in version 2.0.

On the Maximus VIII Hero the PCH (Platform Controller Hub) is being cooled by a passiv heatsink. A closer look at the area where the VRM is, shows that there are two additional heatsinks, which have been connected with a heatpipe. As we already mentioned, ASUS has decided to rework the design and in our opinion ASUS once again managed to improve the looks of these coolers compared to the previous generation. We particularly like the shroud covering the sound implementation, I/O area as well as a part of the power design.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Tomb Raider
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 8	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1