Asus ROG Maximus VIII Impact - RushKit

Asus ROG Maximus VIII Impact - RushKit

Asus ROG Maximus VIII Impact - RushKit

Placing more and more powerful PC hardware into smaller and smaller cases have been something which has continued to grow in popularity over recent years, especially as CPUs have became more and more efficient.

ASUS' Republic of Gamers Impact series of motherboards has always been at the pinnacle of motherboard technology in such a small form factor, providing the same quality of power circuitry and overclocking prowess as most of it's larger counterparts and still contains all required motherboard features while maintaining it's small form factor.

Taking this motherboard out of the box we can see that this motherboard has toned down on the red like the other members of the Republic of Gamers Maximus VIII series of motherboard, taking a more stealthy black and grey aesthetic with only a few red highlights.

Looking at this motherboard we can see that this motherboard features everything that you need out of a Skylake motherboard, even if you are looking to get a decent overclock on your CPU. We can see at the top that this motherboard has great power circuitry for an MITX motherboard, taking up a lot of space on a vertically mounted daughterboard on the top edge of the motherboard.

One other thing that this motherboard supports is full sized DDR4 DIMMS, which means that users will be able to use high speed DDR4 memory on this motherboard, rather than slower power efficient mobile DDR4 memory. A lot of space could have been saved by using smaller SODIMM DDR4 but it is great to see ASUS resist the temptation.

With space being such a limiting factor for MITX motherboards ASUS had to get a little creative when building the audio section of this motherboard, building it on it's own isolated PCB which is vertically attached to the motherboard. The sound section of this motherboard is removable if the user wishes, though I only see a user removing it is they wish to use a full cover motherboard water block.

The only thing that this motherboard lacks is an M.2 slot, though with space being at such a premium I wonder is such a large amount of space could be dedicated to an M.2 device alone given how feature packed this motherboard already is.

Please note that this does not mean that this motherboard does not support NVMe devices, as this motherboard does have a U.2 port, so you will be able to use an NVMe storage device, just not an M.2 version.

On the rear IO we can see that this space will be used for a lot of features that we would typically find on the motherboard, like a power switch, reset switch and even a post code screen.

For Video outs we only have a single HDMI port here, but in the majority of cases you will not need any more than this, especially since most if not all users will be using this motherboard with a GPU.

Conclusion

When looking at this motherboard I have been amazed by how much ASUS have managed to fit into a motherboard of this size, offering everything that a small form factor PC gamer would ever need, offering a large number of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports and beefy enough circuitry for some heavy overclocking.

The only thing that this motherboard lacks is an M.2 slot, which is going to be a point of contention for some of you, though there is a U.2 slot for those who want to use an ultra fast SSD with this motherboard.

To put things simply this motherboard is the best that you can really do on a motherboard of this size, it offers high quality audio components, overclocking ready VRMs and even a post code reader and power/reset switches.

Trying to do more in this form factor will comes with some major sacrifices, like using laptop sized DDR4 DIMMS or lowering the all round quality of what ASUS has built here. The ASUS Maximus VIII Impact is one of the best looking MITX motherboards ASUS has ever produced, which makes us look forward to reviewing this motherboard intensely. Will we get our 6700K to 4.8GHz again?

You can join the discussion on ASUS's ROG VIII Impact on the OC3D Forums.

1 - Asus ROG Maximus VIII Impact - RushKit «Prev 1 Next»

Most Recent Comments