The Board - Layout

Taking a look at the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME motherboard itself, you can easily see the majesty of the design here. There is a huge amount of connectivity not to be found elsewhere, and the new esthetic design is rather subdued and easy on the eyes. You can see some obvious design cues that show ASUS's dedication to extreme users here, looking at the included backplates on the rear of the board, both by the CPU VRM and under the Intel Z170 Express chipset.


The area around the CPU socket is closely confined by the heatsinks surrounding it, although it is ready for extreme cooling and proper insulation. Opening the socket, there is a hole in the socket, put there on purpose for you to slip a thermal diode in for proper temperature reporting.


It is rather redundant for me to say much more about the DIMM slots, other than that there are four of them. They are capable of supporting nearly any DIMM on the market today, as well as pushing those DIMMs to their ultimate limit. The expansion slots, on the other hand, are comprised of four PCIe x16 physical slots with varied connectivity based on which you populate, with another two PCIe x1 slots rounding things out. The ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME is capable of supporting Quad-GPU SLI, not Quad-SLI, as the bottom-most PCIe slot is only a PCIe x4 link electrically. All slots are PCIe 3.0, including the PCIe x1 slots.


The back panel actually features more than I expected. With the usual USB, LAN, audio and such still there, there are also a DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB 3.1 Type-C connector. Also present are CMOS Clear and BIOS Flashback buttons, along with a PS/2 port. There is more SATA connectivity than is needed by most, with dual SATA Express connectors, a U.2 port for NVMe devices, four additional "plain" SATA connectors, and a single M.2 Socket 3 port (just under the PCH cooler).


The board's bottom edge comes with the usual stuff; headers for the OC Panel and add-on fan controller and a MOLEX plug for additional power to your PCIe devices. There is also a switch to choose which BOIS is in use, along with a switch to enable "default" Crossfire/SLI support.