Ahead of its launch, ASUS showed off its flagship socket LGA1151 motherboard, the ROG Maximus VIII Extreme. Based on the Intel Z170 Express chipset, this board offers the largest feature-set from ASUS' stable, for the enthusiast crowd. Built in the ATX (almost E-ATX wide) form-factor, the board retains the styling of its series siblings, such as the Maximus VIII Hero, but does away with the red+black for a more contemporary golden orange+black scheme, which made its debut with the GeForce GTX 980 Ti MATRIX Platinum graphics card (also pictured here).

The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin ATX power connectors, and conditions it for the CPU with a 16-phase VRM. The CPU socket is wired to four DDR4 DIMM slots. Expansion slots include four PCI-Express 3.0 x16, from which three are wired to the CPU, and one to the PCH. All four are PCIe gen 3.0. Storage connectivity includes an SFF-8639 U.2 32 Gb/s connector, an M.2 32 Gb/s slot, two SATA-Express 16 Gb/s, and eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports. Networking includes 802.11 ac WLAN, Bluetooth 4.0, and gigabit Ethernet (all Intel controllers). The new SupremeFX onboard audio solution borrows a lot of tech from ASUS' discrete sound cards, and comes with an 5.25-inch front-panel bay with rotary controls, and front-panel jacks. The board features a boat-load of overclocker-centric features, including dual-BIOS.