ASUS Maximus VIII Ranger Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 26.11.15Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The Maximus VIII Ranger is the most aggressively priced ASUS Republic of Gamers board, which doesn't mean there isn't a number of interesting features. At a first glance the Maximus VIII Ranger definitely leaves a very good impression. The mix of overclocking features and solid audio hardware makes this an interesting motherboard for an ATX-gaming system. And next to a very nice looking design, which has been reworked for this series of ROG motherboards, you find useful features like for example GameFirst. This software allows you to configure your network device the way gaming traffic gets prioritized (keyword traffic shaping). Furthermore also on this board we find an M.2 slot, which has been wired to the PCH using four PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes. This slot can also be equipped with U.2 adapters to install NVMe SSDs. | -
Design - Features |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically the ASUS Maximus VIII Ranger's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Regarding the PCI-Express x16 slots there we have nothing to complain about. A closer look at the area around the CPU socket shows, that there is plenty of space to install big aircoolers without running into any issues. What we also liked is where the power and reset buttons are. Especially when you overclock memory using liquid nitrogen, then it makes sense to not have them next to the DIMM slots, since they will freeze quite quickly. ASUS also decided to further improve the onboard audio, by adding a dedicated DAC as well as high-quality Nichicon capacitors. | -
Angled SATA
connectors - Space around the CPU socket - Placement of PCIe slots - Number of different storage connectors |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 2D benchmarks we ran, we see that this is the fourth fastest board we've tested so far. When taking the average of all 3D results this board comes in on a very good second rank. As always we had a look at power consumption and we can say that also from an energy efficiency point of view the Maximus VIII Ranger does well. | - 3DMark 11 - 3DMark Vantage - Super Pi 32M - Sleeping Dogs |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASUS has a beautiful looking BIOS when it comes to their ROG series motherboard. The UEFI BIOS gets a black background and there are a few additional red design elements. Meanwhile it's almost normal that a BIOS is absolutely complete offering countless features. If you're looking for overclocking options you'll find a great many of them and they are equally practical for novices and extreme overclockers. We always love the pre-defined profiles, which make overclocking quite a bit easier. Apart from that we especially want to underline the memory profiles ASUS has created. These can help a great deal if you're trying to get high-end memory to work. Boosting our CPU to 5.0 GHz absolutely no problem at all. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The Maximus VIII Ranger comes with a reasonable numer of features as well as excellent perfomance. Currently this board costs 160 Euro and at that price we can recommend it. | -
Price
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Gaming - Air/Water Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Maximus VIII Ranger good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Preview |
ASUS Maximus VIII Impact Review
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