The Board - A Closer Look

As its name implies, the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME isn't your everyday board. It costs a lot of money and is packed with a ton of stuff that isn't really intended for everyone. But if you consider yourself EXTREME, this truly is the board for you.


There are several other board features that are worth mentioning when talking about the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME. The first of these consists of the EPS power connectors for the CPU. Some boards have a 4-pin plug, while other offer an 8-pin plug, but the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME offers both, which lowers the heat due to PSU cables and that of any associated wiring in the board by spreading the load out over both connectors. A single 8-pin connector is also going to be more than enough to provide the actual power a Skylake CPU needs, so you don't need to use both plugs, but it is still a nice feature to have as you set this board up for long-term use. Likewise, the DIMM VRM isn't a simple single-phase design as there are two phases here, each more than powerful enough for the job. This also plays a bit into the ability this board has to disable certain DIMM channels (and PCIe slots, should you desire), which makes a fault diagnosis when benchmarking that much easier. There are also ASUS-specific voltage controllers all over the board, so you can be sure that each section of the board's power delivery is more than ready for these advanced features.


When you are benching, or perhaps setting up the board for the first time and checking on your installed components to make sure they work, you can make use of the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME's provided on-board buttons and switches. All the usual buttons are here, along with some advanced features, like the switches and jumpers for disabling the DIMM slots and PCIe lanes, as I just mentioned. There are voltage check points, the fabled MemOK! button (which I have found immensely useful in the past), a POST code display, LN2 mode jumper, and Slow Mode switch—pretty much everything any serious overclocker has use for and then some. I also found a guide for the SATA ports that make up the SATA Express plugs, which shows which SATA plug is which. This feature is incredibly useful as you'll usually find the numerical ordering of SATA ports to be vertical, but as you can see in the diagram above, numerical ordering of these SATA EXPRESS ports is horizontal because of their plugs.


Accessory controllers like those in charge of added USB 3.0 functionality are supplied by ASMedia, as is the norm for ASUS products. While it may seem trivial, it does show the quality of these bits to be fantastic enough for EXTREME boards even though these also make it onto much lower-priced boards. ASUS prides itself on providing quality products, and having controllers such as the ASMedia ASM1142 on both value-oriented and enthusiast products shows that these controllers merit being used in all usage scenarios.


We also need to talk a little bit about the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME's PCH cooler. It has lights. Lights that change color. When the board is off, the cooler is dark, but power it up for the first time and a faint red glow comes out of the ROG logo, slowly pulsing on and off. Once you have got your OS and the provided software installed, you can change the color of the logo, its brightness, and the way the light shows itself (like in-tune to music or relating to CPU temperatures). Such incredible flexibility is nice to have, although I would have liked this function to be available to all on-board LEDs (the audio LEDs remain either red or off, depending on which option you picked in the BIOS).