An extreme budget for an extreme board
Let’s be clear here. We understand not everyone is into overclocking. It can be a daunting, possibly bank-breaking pastime, with the potential to take your hardearned hardware and render it as useful as sunglasses in a thunderstorm. That being said, for those who are looking for the absolute pinnacle of Skylake mobos, those who want the very best overclocking potential, regardless of cost, the Asus Maximus Extreme series should be your first port of call.
When we test products—motherboards in particular—we have one specific benchmark that they all need to hit. And more often than not, we are always limited by one common problem: the silicon lottery. Before this, we believed that our Intel Core i7-6700K was limited to 4.8GHz, and no matter what we tried, messing around with every setting and voltage under the sun, we could never surpass that. Even Asus’s RoG Maximus VIII Hero failed to go beyond 4.8GHz. At this point, you can probably guess what happened next. With just a few small tweaks—one to the ratio, and one changing the TPU setting in Asus’s very fluid UEFI BIOS—we managed to grab ourselves a stable 4.9GHz on top of successfully completing a full round of benchmarks on Cinebench R15.
Rather worryingly, this wasn’t the scariest part of our experience with the Maximus VIII Extreme’s overclocking abilities. After enabling Asus’s 5-Way Optimization software in AI Suite, it managed to overclock itself to 4.85GHz with relative ease. Undoubtedly, this means we’re one step closer to Skynet. After all, if machines can overclock themselves, what’s stopping their inevitable rise to power and our mutual annihilation?
It seems as though the Extreme wasn’t entirely finished there either, as it wasn’t the silicon preventing an even higher overclock, but the chip’s temperature. There’s almost no doubt that if we had a more powerful cooling solution, our little Skylake CPU could hit that glorious 5GHz frequency with no problems. It’s a shame that the NZXT Kraken X61 just couldn’t quite hit the mark when it came to managing those CPU-punishing temperatures.
To be fair, this is a $500 motherboard. You’d expect it to perform well. But if you’re looking for something extra, the Maximus Extreme has oodles of other features to satisfy your glorious PC gaming appetite. In addition to the plethora of microfine alloy chokes, 10K black metallic capacitors, and fancy MOSFET solutions, the Extreme comes with the same audio solution as found on the Maximus Hero. Of course, you still get everything AI Suite has to muster. And on top of that, you’re graced with wireless AC and Intel’s network traffic management. But that’s not all—there’s an overclocking panel, a plethora of temperature monitoring points, and even a fan controller expansion card included in the rather large box.
Does that warrant the price? Sort of. If overclocking isn’t a priority, but you want to stick with Asus, grab yourself a Maximus VIII Hero—it’s still a fantastic motherboard, looks great, and features all the same gaming-oriented specs of the Extreme, bar the heavy overclocking stuff. If you want something smaller (again presuming you want to stay with Asus), the Gene or the Impact is probably going to be your jam. If you’re not really a gamer but rely on solid dependability, you might want to take a look at the TUF Sabertooth line-up instead. But for that minority of focused overclockers, this is as good as it gets. – Zak Storey
Specifications
Chipset - Intel Z170
Socket - LGA 1151
Form factor - EATX
Memory support - DDR4/3866
Storage - 8x SATA 6Gbps, 1x M.2, 2x SATA Express, 1x U.2
USB - 6x USB 2.0, 8x USB 3.0, 3x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C