The ASUS ROG Maximus VIII EXTREME flagship motherboard has now become available. This is the pinnacle of ASUS ROG's range and is big in size (E-ATX), features and in the comprehensive package available in the box to buyers. To celebrate retail availability ASUS has put together one of its popular unboxing blog posts showing you exactly what you get for your hard earned cash. The ASUS ROG Maximus VIII range was first launched a few weeks ago, and is aimed at gamers and overclockers.
ASUS trumpets the newly available LGA1151, Z170 chipset, motherboard's main attractions as; superior specs, the best gaming audio, the best gaming performance, best gaming networking and best protection. Actually, ASUS claims the same for all its ROG Maximus VIII range, but the EXTREME has greater board space and capacity simply for more of everything and the retail pack is extremely comprehensive.
The features of the ASUS ROG Maximus VIII EXTREME motherboard are probably most succinctly summed up with a labelled board diagram showing ports, connectors, slots, chips and interfaces. I've inserted such a diagram, above, you can click it to zoom in.
A rundown of board specifications highlights would include; the capacity to create a quad-GPU SLI or 4-way CrossFireX setup, 4x DDR4 (3866 OC) slots, the large heatsink dissipating heat from the Extreme Engine Digi+ power delivery hardware, thermal backplates, 24-bit ESS Hi-Fi Sabre DAC, Intel Gigabit Ethernet, LANGuard and GameFirst technologies, overclocking buttons on the board or control via the included OC Panel II hardware overclocking module, Thunderbolt 3, 3x3 802.11ac Wi-Fi , NVMe U.2, M.2, SATA Express storage interfaces with USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C. You can find the full spec list on the official product page, here.
The ASUS ROG Maximus VIII EXTREME motherboard is available in retail now, I've found it at $499.99 at Newegg, USA. In the retiail box you will receive the following:
- User’s manual
- ASUS Q-Shield
- 8 x SATA 6Gb/s cables
- M.2 screw
- CPU installation tool
- Installation DVD
- ASUS 3T3R dual-band Wi-Fi antenna (Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac compliant)
- Fan Extension Card (3 x 4-pin fan out)
- Fan Extension Card screw pack
- SLI bridge
- CrossFire cables
- Q-connector
- 3 x thermal sensor cables
- ROG metal badge
- 12 ROG cable labels
- 3 x ROG fan labels
- 5-pin to 5-pin cable
- ROG Door Hanger
- OC Panel II
- OC Panel II 5.25-inch bay metal bracket
- OC Panel II cable
- OC Panel II screw pack
Earlier this month HEXUS looked over the ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Impact mini-ITX motherboard, which managed to squeeze a lot of attractive qualities into a rather size restricted package (17cm square).
