Asus today announced its new ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme motherboard for AMD Ryzen owners. The passively-cooled X570 motherboard arrives to round off ROG's extensive X570 portfolio and compete with today's best motherboards.
Doing justice to its name, the ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme is an E-ATX motherboard with a power delivery subsystem that conforms to a 18+2 design. Asus equipped the ROG Crosshair VII Extreme with 90A power stages, microfine alloy chokes and 10K Japanese-made, black, metallic capacitors to supply overclockers with a clean power delivery. Two 8-pin EPS power connectors feed the processor with what it needs. Although the ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme doesn't carry the X570S moniker, the motherboard does flaunt passive chipset cooling, similar to the ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero.
The motherboard comes with four DDR4 RAM slots, meaning you can endow the motherboard with 128GB of memory. At the time of writing, Asus hasn't listed the maximum supported memory speed. However, we expect the ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme to support up to DDR4-5100 when paired with a Ryzen 5000 processor.
The ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme provides six standard SATA III ports and up to five M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 slots. Of course, you'll need to have a Ryzen 5000 or Ryzen 3000 to take advantage of the standard; otherwise, the M.2 slots will default back to PCIe 3.0 x4. Three of the M.2 slots are connected directly to the processor, while the other two M.2 slots are linked to the X570 chipset through Asus' ROG DIMM.2 expansion card for M.2 SSDs.
On the expansion side, the motherboard offers two PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and a single PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. The latter is tied to the X570 chipset. In terms of internet connectivity, the ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet through Marvell's AQtion AQC113CS controller and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet via Intel's I225-V controller. There's also 2x2 Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 for those who dislike cables.
We spotted eight USB Type-A ports on the ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme's rear panel. The product page isn't complete yet, so we're unsure of their speeds. What's evident is the inclusion of two Intel Thunderbolt 4 ports with support for DisplayPort 1.4 and Thunderbolt video outputs and two DisplayPort-In connections.
The motherboard's audio system is based around Realtek's ALC4082 audio codec with Asus' SupremeFX treatment. Being a premium motherboard, Asus also included ESS Sabre's 9018Q2C DAC/AMP chip.
The ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme is the flagship X570 for Asus' ROG family so it comes with all the bells and whistles, such as a 2-inch OLED display, M.2 latch mechanism for SSDs, graphics card holder - just to mention some.
Asus hasn't revealed the price or release date for the ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme yet.
