The ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme Review: The Other $500 Option
by Ian Cutress on April 7, 2016 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- Asus
- ROG
- Skylake
- Z170
- Thunderbolt 3
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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HollyDOL - Friday, April 8, 2016 - link
agreed, SATAe is useless...So far the only board with 2xU.2 I found is Asus's Maximus VIII Hero Alpha... but then there are lots of features on it I could live without without giving me a wrinkle :-)
shineproductions - Saturday, April 9, 2016 - link
ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ is an excellent board.pseudoid - Friday, April 8, 2016 - link
I had an older Maximus Formula and was way overdue for an update to my rig. I opted for the Asus Z170 Deluxe with dual-LANs.I am not a gamer and wanted a current tip of the technology top-dog with the hopes that it will last me as long as my previous ROG rig lasted, once setup. Massive learning curve prior to build. Everything worked fine but my only regret is the fact that these high-end MoBo types require much maintenance.
I don't know >> seems like there at least 10 Asus applications that are installed in Win10, and one that is called "EZUpdate" but even if it worked properly to tell me the available updates, it still takes a lot of time to maintain the beast.
You have been warned!
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
"Option"Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Yes, medical tech actually has to work reliably.olePigeon - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link
Is there any reason why they don't use tantalum capacitors? They'd be much lower profile and, in my opinion, would look nicer.vacavalier - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
Your choice of GPU's is baffling, to say the least... Why not, test using more common-place/popularly used GPU's for more realistic testing.I am not saying or advocating that this will shame the Maximus Extreme, but at least use up-to-date GPU's, as you are running the latest CPU/RAM/Motherboard layout(s) for this...
Just saying...
jp209087 - Monday, September 5, 2016 - link
No doubt this is one of the best gaming system to buy, but its also costly too. Also consider review this <a href="http://www.ezydeal.net/Category/DESKTOP-and-MONITO...Gastec - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
Asus pricing this motherboard so high is just a move to raise the prices of the their more mainstream motherboards in the future. Nvidia does it too and soon everybody will do it. You were used to upgrade a certain PC component with n amount of money in the past years? Well, how about you try this next-gen pricing: TWICE what you used to pay :)north0019 - Thursday, October 6, 2016 - link
I bought one of these boards back in June because I'm building a No Compromise RIGOnly problem is that the board has been back to Asus 3 times now with failure to post.
Customer service at ASUS is the worst with phone support not talking with tech support and complete lack of follow thru or ability to communicate what work if any has been done.