Asus ROG Maximus 8 Hero

The Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero is probably the coolest looking motherboard featured in our roundup and information technology'southward certainly i of the best equipped. The Maximus VIII Hero has been dressed in black with mostly grey highlights and a little scarlet as Asus moves away from the predominantly scarlet/black design for this ane.

Whereas fancy heatsinks and heat pipes used to cool the ability circuitry and chipset where in one case the focal point of aesthetics, attention has now shifted to an internal I/O panel comprehend. We saw this on the Asrock, MSI and EVGA boards just Asus takes it next level, as does Gigabyte only nosotros volition get to them shortly.

Asus has equipped the Maximus Viii Hero with a big plastic covering to hide the ugly I/O panel connectors and block whatsoever reflections which might spoil that special build. Of form Asus also accept the opportunity to use that actress existent-estate to make it with the Maximus Viii name and their SupremeFX audio.

Getting away from how great the lath looks for a moment, let's check out the features. Similar near Z170 motherboards, the Maximus VIII Hero features three full length PCIe x16 slots. The primary slot starts on the second row of the grid with a single PCIe x1 slot above information technology. This is a prissy pattern feature as information technology ways larger air coolers won't conflict with your graphics card.

The start and second PCIe x16 slots are separated by two slots while the second and 3rd PCIe x16 slots are separated by just a single slot. When using two graphics cards the PCIe configuration will be set up to x8/x8 while a tertiary will operate in x4 mode.

When it comes to storage the Maximus 8 Hero is quite well equipped, with eight SATA 6Gb/s ports on offer along with ii SATA Limited ports and an Yard.two slot.

The 1000.2 slot supports 30, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm long cards and supports PCIe x4 and SATA devices. With a SATA Thousand.ii SSD installed SATA ports one and 2 volition become unavailable. Nonetheless with a PCIe SSD installed into the G.2 slot it is possible to use all eight SATA ports giving the Maximus Eight Hero a maximum of nine simultaneous usable storage interfaces.

Along with the 6 SATA 6Gb/s ports provided by the Z170 chipset Asus has added an boosted two ports using an ASMedia ASM1061 chip, the SATA ports connected to this scrap have been colour coded black whereas the rest are grayness.

Like all the boards seen and so far the Maximus VIII Hero sports the Realtek ALC1150 codec for sound support and like Asrock and MSI information technology is a bit dressed up. Asus calls its solution SupremeFX 2022, which its describe as "jacked-up audio, within and out". What does that mean exactly?

It means you get an ESS ES9023P digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with Hyperstream technology, Nichicon capacitors, 2Vrms headphone amp and a Sonic SenseAmp that automatically detects and optimizes any headset (32-600 ohms) for purest sound quality. This looks dandy on paper, so we are great to run across how it sounds shortly.

When information technology comes to networking the Maximus VIII Hero is limited for a board in this cost range. While we are happy enough to forgo wireless support out of the box, there is just a single Gigabit LAN port. That said, this should be fine for about users and thankfully Asus has gone with the Intel I219-V chip.

Asus has stuck with the standard six USB 3.0 ports that are provided by the Z170 chipset, though they have included a pair of USB iii.1 ports likewise which is prissy.

Around at the I/O panel we discover just two USB 3.0 ports though both the USB three.1 ports can be found here as well. Oddly Asus decided to offer iv USB two.0 ports rather than iv USB 3.0 ports and only two USB two.0 ports. There is as well a legacy PS/2 port, a BIOS flackback button, DisplayPort, HDMI port, Gigabit LAN port, five sound jacks and an optical audio output.

Asus has included enough of Windows software with the Maximus Eight Hero and we actually liked the DIP 5 (Dual Intelligent Processors 5) software. There are heaps of voltage, frequency and ability options that can all be adjusted inside Windows and it works well. Too included in the software package is Sonic Studio 2 for modifying the audio and GameFirst Iii network-controlling software, which is like the Killer NIC software but for the Intel I219-5.

There is also a Lighting Control app which can exist used to adjust the color of the chipset backlighting, likewise as RAMDisk, which tin can be used to turn exceeds system retentiveness into ultra-fast storage.

The Maximus VIII Hero UEFI BIOS is equally expert every bit any we take seen, featuring a make clean design. Like the Asrock UEFI, it boosts by default into a basic bill of fare and experienced users volition want to hit 'F7' to enter the advanced style.