ASUS Maximus VIII Impact Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 30.11.15Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
The Maximus VIII Impact is a very fast motherboard, which comes with a great feature mix. There are numerous overclocking settings and tools and apart from that there is the usual high quality audio hardware, which makes this a state-of-the-art motherboard for mini-ITX-gaming. Next to a very nice looking design you also find useful software like GameFirst III. This software allows you to configure your network device the way gaming traffic gets prioritized (keyword traffic shaping). Furthremore you get ASUS's RAM Disk and lots of other goodies, which make this board even more appealing. Absolutely remarkable, that's what the ten phase power design is. ASUS again succeed in bringing even extreme overclocking to the mini-ITX form factor. |
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Design |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically, the ASUS Maximus VIII Impact's layout has been very well thought. In order to make more space on the tiny PCB ASUS decided to used two daughter PCBs, one for the power design and one for the audio solution. Furthermore, the straight SATA 6Gbps ports have been placed at the only location where it makes sense to have them, when you look at this from an accessibility point of view. Also due to space contraints ASUS has put the debug LED as well as power and reset button on the I/O panel. Since the CPU socket is in the center of the PCB it is possible to install even the largest CPU coolers. Another great addition is the U.2 solit, which allows attaching NVMe SSDs. Also on this board is a WiFi 802.11ac / Bluetooth 4.0 module. | - Space around the CPU
socket
- Audio Solution
- Power/Reset-Button - Debug LED - Power Design |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 2D benchmarks we ran, we see that this is the second fastest board we've tested so far. When taking the average of all 3D results this board manages to score a new best result. Having a look at power consumption we see this board pull a surprisingly high amout of power from the plug in idle but on the other hand, when running under load the system was pretty energy efficient. | - 3DMark - 3DMark 11 - PCMark 08 - SiSoft Sandra Cryptography - UC Bench - Super Pi 1M - wPrime |
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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 ASUS Maximus VIII Impact is a very fast Z170 motherboard. At 229 Euro it's definitely no bargain but if you want to build a state-of-the-art mini-ITX rig, this is a recommendable board. | -
Price
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Gaming - Air/Water Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Maximus VIII Impact good 5 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Maximus VIII Ranger Review |
ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Review
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