ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly Review
Published by Luca Rocchi on 24.03.16Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
Without a doubt, the ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly is a true high-end motherboard. If you're planning on overclocking your Skylake CPU, no matter whether it's extreme overclocking or aircooled OC, this is an ideal platform. Apart from that this board is also a great choice for powerful gaming system as well as workstations, which packs a good punch. We appreciate that many different storage devices can be attached no matter if they feature an M.2, SATA, SATA Express or even U.2 connector. Apart from that there is a high-quality power design, which is more than capable of handling extreme overclocking. It's almost self-evident that this much high-end is not cheap. Unlike the classic red and black model, this version comes with a couple of additional features like the ROG 10G EXPRESS network card and an external sound card from ASUS's Supreme series. The ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly sells for no less than 400 Euro these days. We're pretty sure there are quite a few who users might be asking why there is no PLX chip on this board in order to avoid any lanes sharing. The reason for that is pretty simple: PLX chips are insanely expensive (a PEX8747 costs approximately USD 70) and that would have pushed the cost for the entire motherboard above 500 Euro. That in the end is more than what the Rampage V Extreme costs. |
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Design |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| The ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly'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. The first PCI-Express x16 slot had to be placed very close to a heatsink, which makes removing a graphics cards a bit tougher. A closer look at the area around the CPU socket shows, there is plenty of space to install big aircoolers without running into any issues. 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 - Overclocking Features |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 2D benchmarks we ran, we see that this is the third fastest board we've tested so far. When taking the average of all 3D results this board manages to score the 4th place. Having a look at power consumption we see this board pulls quite a lot of power from the plug in idle but and when running under load the system is about average. | - 3DMark Fire Strike - 3DMark Vantage CPU - SiSoft Sandra Arithmetic - SiSoft Sandra Multimedia - SiSoft Sandra Memory Latency - Cinebench R15 - Tomb Raider High |
- Power consumption idle | |
| 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 numerous memory profiles ASUS has added. 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 Extreme Assembly is a fast and very well equipped Z170 motherboard, which ships with a BIOS that comes with numerous and easily accesible features. As you might have expected, this must high-end comes at a price and that price is about 400 Euro these days. | -
Price
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Gaming |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly good 5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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