Asus ROG Maximus VIII Formula Motherboard Review : The Gamers Delight Motherboard Is Equipped With All The Myriad Features But Comes At Higher Price Point

A new member of Maximum motherboard series has hit the market with loads of new features. The ROG Maximus VIII Formula motherboard comes with Intel Z170 Express, which is a single-chipset design that supports 6th-generation Intel LGA1151 Core i7/Core i5/Core i3/Pentium/Celeron processors.

The Skylake Architecture

The Maximus VIII Formula supports Skylake architecture which is a powerful graphics engine and is very power friendly.

Combining the top-notch features

This motherboard hosts cooling masters at EK Water Blocks to create CrossChill EK, an extreme-performance cooling block with a copper channel. With G1/4in threaded fittings CrossChill EK is a quick fit for your existing setup and, when you chill with liquid, you can shrink MOSFET temperatures by up to 23˚C.

The VIII Formula is build using high-precision laser-engraving technology enabling RGB light of 28 integrated LEDs. Also, you get an ROG's Aura RGB Strip header, which makes it easy to cast colors across your rig and room, by simply using standard 12V RGB strips onto the 4-pin Aura RGB-strip header.

Gaming requires the best audio as well, thus, Maximus VIII Formula comes with onboard professional-grade audio components, including an ESS ES9023P digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with Hyperstream technology, ultra-low-jitter clock, Nichicon capacitors, 2VRMS headphone amp, and Sonic SenseAmp that automatically detects and optimizes any headset (32-600ohms). SupremeFX 2015 also features intuitive Sonic Studio II letting you enjoy different audio effects plus has noise-cancellation technology.

No Expertise Required for Overclocking

ASUS Maximus VIII Formula comes with AI Suite III software that has the basic interface which more or less appears the same on all ASUS' motherboards. AI Suite III controls the USB Turbo / UASP Boost function, lets update BIOS over the internet and more. This helps you to tune the power savings over performance and vice versa. The settings are not on a single page and displays each category, enabling users to understand at a quick glance.

Maximus VIII Formula can be customized easily as per your needs as 5-way optimization sorts all the complex settings with a click. This dynamically optimizes essential aspects of your system based on real-time use. Its user-friendly BIOS UI enables you to make changes as like you are an expert. There is no complexity, everything is available just right in front of you, even you can easily configure overclocking with it. The overclocking isn't an easier task, however, the software makes it quite easy for us. Overclocking worked perfectly and we didn't find any issue due to a bad overclock.

AURA LED

ASUS motherboard has the new Aura application that allows you setup the LED colors, brightness and effects patterns. The RGB header and standard 5050 RGB LED strips can be controlled independently from each other.

Connectivity

The motherboard is equipped with NVM Express U.2 and M.2, USB 3.1 Type-A/C, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi that let's connect latest solid-state drives (SSDs), using both U.2 and M.2 connectors delivering data-transfer speeds of up to 32 Gbps, and all with plug-and- play ease. This comes with both USB 3.1 Type-A and reversible USB 3.1 Type-C built in.

Performance

It has been designed excellently and everything is kept in a clean manner. We added 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, AMD Radeon R7 GPU, 8 GB of Zion DDR4 RAM and Seagate 2 TB of Hard Drive and installed Windows 10 OS. To check its capability, we used three benchmarks as well as some real-life tests. During our three weeks continues test, we found this motherboard a smart choice as its comes with loads of features as well as has an inbuilt capability to optimize PC performance.

We played some high graphics intensive games, like Shadow of Mordor, and there was no lag in the performance. While running the game, we run few other applications such as MS-office, Chrome, and Mozilla browsers, having 10 tabs in each. Still it handled them efficiently, without any performance lag. Running various benchmarks it scored 1922 on 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme, 5074 on PCMark 8 Creative Accelerated, 3203.2 on PassMark Performance Test 8.0 and 3479 on 3D Graphics Mark.