Gadgetory

excellent this motherboard here is the ASUS Maximus 8 formula or m8f for short and as rog motherboards go it sits just below the Maximus 8 extreme and the Asus z170 lineup the formula has a lot to offer though and traditionally it even gets a feature or two that the extreme version does not such as a built-in vrm water block by ek and we can't forget that sexy RGB lighting support as well as this is Asus best answer to the motherboard RGB LED arms race that kicked off last year with the msi x99s the m8f might not be the first RGB LED motherboard but it has a pretty solid claim to being the first one to get it right and with the unmistakably badass rog armor and a laundry list of additional features you get one of the best z170 motherboards I've laid eyes on with the m8 F but it does cost a pretty penny at $400 MSRP now I'm not usually one to dwell on packaging but I do think Asus does a good job with theirs and if we look at the box we can at least get a good idea of what they're most proud of with the MAF first off there's that cross chill vrm block for the cpu power delivery is it necessary to water cool your V RMS no not really but it does make for a sweet-looking cooling loop if you're going that route and I think Asus positions the formula is more of an ideal water cooling board versus the extreme which is more for maximum overclocking and world records that sort of thing and hey if you're going to set up a vrm block you can't go wrong having EK design it it has gianna quarter threading and yes it will work just fine air-cooled if you're not setting up a water cooling loop next is the RGB lighting which I will come back to later after I actually set it up also there's a pretty nice 802 dot eleven AC 2 by 2mu MIMO capable 867 megabits per second Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card integrated and of course the ROG Armour carry over from the thermal armor that Asus originally introduced with their tough series the armour on the front is plastic but there is nary a glossy section to be found it looks amazing as you can hopefully tell and it even serves the practical purpose of providing some shielding for the more sensitive surface mounted components on the motherboard the armour on the back is a metal piece proudly emblazoned with the Republic of gamers logo and it's all done in a very well matched dark Finnish specs beyond these I will divide into two categories there's the standard stuff for this platform such as the LGA 1151 socket the z170 chipset these things will pretty much be the same across most skylake motherboards and then there's the extra sauce that Asus is added to make the MAF stand out from the crowd standard stuff includes a standard ATX form factor four dimm slots for dual channel ddr3 a pretty typical PCI Express slot layout including two gray by 16 Gen 3 slots that link directly to the CPU this is for your single graphics card up on top or a 2-way SLI or crossfire configuration if you populate both in which case both slots will run it by eight and by eight speed since there's 16 total PCIe gen3 lanes available from a skylight CPU also when I say skylake CPU in this video I'm pretty much assuming that you're using a 6700 K is there's no sane reason to use any other skylight CPU with a board of this caliber and cost also you've got three total PCI Express Gen 2 by 3 I'm sorry gen to buy one slots for some additional expansion and that lone PCIe gen3 by 4 slot at the very bottom which could be used for 3-way crossfire but should not be because that would be dumb it is a buy for connection and it's coming off the chipset that will introduce some latency and also this buy fork slot will only run it by 2 speed if you're using all of your SATA ports since it shares bandwidth with SATA ports 5 & 6 more on that when I talk about storage in just a moment rounding out the motherboard connections let's talk fan support which is very good 7 total fan headers on this board all can be used for 4 pin PWM fan connections but the two at the top are specifically for the CPU and then a third one up there is made for PWM pump connection which is an awesome awesome feature for water cooling and if seven headers isn't enough there's an ext fan header down here in the bottom right that can connect up to the Asus fan extension card which is a cool little piece of gear and I am actually using it an arctic Panther built back there but unfortunately not included in the accessory so you would have to buy it separately there are also three two pin thermal sensor connections at the top middle and bottom and you can use those to place some temperature sensors wherever you feel that they are needed in your build along the bottom of the board you've got front panel connectors a cup of those aforementioned fan headers a couple USB 2.0 headers one of them which will also work with the ROG OC panel that is also sold separately a USB 3.0 header which is one of two the other is a right-angle header which is up here by the 24 pin power the memo ok button can be very helpful in getting tricky RAM configurations to boot there's front panel audio there as well of course and the super important RGB header that lets you connect standard 5050 RGB LED strips 12 volts at 2 amps and up to 2 meters in length if you haven't noticed I've kind of transitioned into talking about special asus rog features but never mind let's go over storage the single m2 slot on the MAF is kind of hidden it's behind this plastic panel down here at the bottom which is nice if you want to hide an ugly green PCBs SD for example like this one but kinda sucks if you really wanted to show off your sexy black PCBs SD like if you just got a new samsung 950 pro for example it's a key mm2 slot for SSDs supports data and PCIe as well as nvme and it supports m2 SSD lengths from 42 millimeters all the way up to 110 I also notice that while this panel is off you can get up the motherboard battery which is kind of nice although it is hard to say it's this plastic piece can be removed if you had a long graphics card installed in the top slot it is actually pretty important for water coolers who would not want to disassemble their entire water cooling loop or at least remove their GPU if for example their m2 SSD or their motherboard battery were to die that would be a major annoyance anyway there is a u2 port right here next to the m dot 2 port which is nice if you have an Intel 750 series SSD again like I have an Arctic Panther back there but sadly this porc shares bandwidth with the M not - so you cannot run both same time you get eight total SATA Rev 3 ports the 4 on the left or SATA Express compatible with that extra little plug in them I have yet to use data Express for anything personally but it is a good means of adding a couple USB 3.1 ports to the front of your system you would need that accessory though which again is not included I'd much rather have another m2 or UDOT to port them to SATA Express ports is what I'm really trying to say here ok these black SATA ports are controlled by an add-on as media chip and then the final two gray rightmost ports are natively controlled by the z170 chipset but using them limit that by 4 piece a lot at the bottom two by two speeds these storage options will be more than enough for most people but for a $400 board my biggest letdown is that you can't raid up a couple m2 Samsung 950 pros or something like that for an insanely fast storage configuration I mean yes you could get an end a PCIe to MDOT to riser card and put it maybe in the last PCIe buy 4 slot or the second one if you're not running an SLI configuration but it's just a much less elegant solution in my opinion and it would limit the speed of that drive if you filled out all your SATA ports and you had it plugged into that bottom most by four slots also that riser card again is not included in the accessory kit so you wouldn't need to purchase that separately ok moving up the right side of the board we have a 24-pin main power connection there's post LEDs that are right next set as well those will light up as your system powers on so if it hangs you can easily look at the LED that's lit up and that will easily let you determine the culprit of your post issues above that there's a fun interactive area with power and reset buttons as well as the Asus Q code LED that's for debugging more confusing post issues there is also an ln2 header up here although it's under the shroud that is for circumventing the cold boot bug for exotic cooling gurus and shouldn't be an issue that it's underneath the Shred because if you're doing ln2 cooling you're probably to remove that whole shroud anyway ok what am I forgetting there is an a pin CPU power connector up here if you juice to the high end power delivery components for the CPU that includes japanese-made 10k black metal caps next FET MOSFETs and micro-fine alloy chokes the audio is top-notch as well with rog supreme FX 8 channel support and ESS DAC built in a headphone amp for up to six hundred ohm impedance cans nijikawa audio grey caps and the sonic studio to audio tuning suite to help you set up for streaming voice chat and surround sound ok rear panel IO on the left are a clear CMOS an USB bio splash back buttons I love USB BIOS flash back by the way it lets you update your BIOS without even having a CPU or memory installed next to that is connections for you to buy two Wi-Fi antenna DisplayPort and HDMI for use with your skylake CPUs integrated graphics 6 USB 3.0 ports and blue 2 USB 3.1 ports one type a and one type-c a ps2 combo port for those old peripherals you just can't seem to let go of an rj45 port for the Intel I - 1 9 - be wired Nick and gold-plated audio connections for mic in 8 channel surround out or the option of an optical Toslink s/pdif connection despite all of the words that I've just said I have still skipped some stuff with this board like that you can use Network multi gate teaming for your wired connection as well as both wireless channels to maximize your bandwidth or the key bot to feature that lets you use your keyboard shortcuts on your keyboard to do motherboard e things like a quick overclock powering on enabling XMP or clearing your CMOS there's a link to the Asus page on the Maximus 8 formula it's in the description below if you want to double check it for other things that I might have missed but for now I just need to move on and set this board up for some testing I will be right back so I now have my little test bed all set up and good to go here if you're wondering what I installed first I did a 6600 K even though I told you guys that that CPU shouldn't go with this board but it's my wife's CPU and I'm going to overclock it and I wanted to see how far I would overclock so I thought this would be a good demonstration got a hyper 212 Evo on top of that got a couple sticks of corsair ddr4 this is their low profile series a vengeance low profile series 2 by 8 gig kit there i have that Plextor m6e 256 gig SSD that running off of and then i've also plugged in this LED strip right here so that i can demo the RGB LEDs this is from cable mods so big thank you to them for sending this over cable mod has these there they're wide beam LED technology LEDs this one has foam adhesive on the back and it's a 60 centimeter strip they also have these available with magnetic backings on them so if you have a steel case it I definitely recommend those because it's really easy to fidget position them and whatnot one last thing is that I'm connecting it up here with this little adapter piece that came shipped along with this although it says Asus compatibility adapter this was shipped to me along with the LED strip since it was part of this whole demonstration thing but you might want to make sure you get a hold of one of those if you're planning on setting this up for yourself I want to demonstrate a few features of this motherboard this is definitely not exhaustive by any stretch but they are features that I particularly find to be useful so the first one is going to be 5 way optimization so in order to get at this basically you need to get into Windows get all your drivers and everything updated and then you want to install the Asus AI suite 3 from the ACS AI suite 3 you'll have the option to click the 5 way optimization button what this is going to do is do an automatic process with your system it will reboot it a few times it will first automatically overclock your processor which is well in my opinion the most useful thing it'll also go through a couple more energy well it'll it'll optimize your power delivery your digital power delivery it will optimize your power savings features with EPU it will run through fan expert 3 which will reach out to all the fans connected to the system and tune them to the proper speeds I only have one fans so I kind of skipped that and then lastly there's also a thing that will go in and adjust your audio and your networking which also I'm not going to dwell too much I'm mainly focusing on overclock here because I have the 6600 K and after running through all the procedures it does automatic burn in tests like a quick burnin test on the CPU and this got me all the way up to 4.7 gigahertz with this processor so that's basically it in a multiplier overclocked to 47 it's about a 91% increase in CPU speed as you can see here and that's it's a pretty nice overclock even the voltage wasn't too bad it's idling right now but it's only hitting about one point three five to one point three six max which is well within range and I'm I'm pretty happy with that and I'm also very happy that the 6600 K was able to overclock so well I have not restarted and I am in the BIOS or UEFI and let me hide myself so you guys can see what's going on here just going to do another quick rundown of some of the features in the BIOS that I like because Asus gets a lot of positive feedback about it they put a lot of effort into it and right now we're looking at easy mode which it will boot into by default so here's where you can get kind of a quick look at your CPU that's installed the BIOS version what Rams what Ram dims you have installed you get a CPU temperature histogram right here which is nice as well as some easy system tuning ability enough functions here you can switch between quiet performance and energy saving macro mess with those easily mess with your boot manager by dragging and dropping which is also handy did I mention the mouse totally works here you can also do XMP profile or you can look at the fans that you have connected including a call out there for that water pump header turn irst on or off that's helpful as well and there's other cool things you know like you can quickly access the boot menu with f8 I'm going to switch over to advanced mode by hitting f7 over here is the extreme Tweaker area and here's where we can see a lot of the overclocking stuff done by the 5 way optimization which was communicated over to the efi UEFI and is now engaged over here scrolling down you can see just so many different functions and things you can mess around with the extreme Tweaker tweakers paradise allows you to get even more in-depth stuff like f CL k and b CL k messing around anyway though I'm not going to go into all that because I don't even understand what half of it does advanced monitor you can monitor stuff like your temperatures and whatnot that's always useful here's your boot area where you can be boot things you can also like flash directly from the BIOS with the easy flash and all that good stuff a lot of this has been around before anyway going back over to Maine wait no not Maine let's go back here to extremes weaker you might notice one other thing that I like here is that when you are selecting any of these different things that you can change it will give you a little bit of information down here at the bottom like select around operating frequency so for certain functions that you might be more confused about what they do I find those little tips to be extremely helpful you also might notice that you can tap f3 on any particular thing that you're about that you've selected and that will add it to this tab over here which is my favorites and my favorites you can pretty much set up however you want so you know if you're going back into the UEFI over and over again to do a bunch of overclocking or something like that you can do all of the settings right here so that they're quick quickly and easily accessible and you can go ahead with whatever you might be doing for your overclock very very handy you even have a quick note function over here just have a note pad thing and do stuff and then lastly wait what was I going to say lastly Oh lastly when you do hit f10 the other thing I like about the a spouse is it will tell you all the changes you've made here when you go to save and reset I haven't made any changes but it would list them all so you'd be like ok here's exactly what I've done and that is also quite handy and finally guys I have set up a demonstration here for the RGB LEDs so hopefully you can see the lit up points on the motherboard which should be the ROG logo down there in the bottom right the formula logo right there about a CPU socket and there's also a bit of a extra lighting right up here by the i/o shield I've also connected up that cable mod RGB LED strip which is just sort of taped to the table right here and I'm going to run through the aura software which is an independent of AI Suite 3 which you can use to modify stuff so of course you have static and you can just take this little color wheel here here move it around and hit apply right now I have it sinking so it's sinking the LEDs on the RGB header as well as the LEDs on the motherboard so you notice everything just turned blue and do like a lighter blue over here or we can go into the green range over here or we can go up to yellow or you know anything that you can kind of find on this color wheel in between at first I thought there was no way to just do white but if you want white you just click on this little guy over here the slider the sliders on the right just account for dimness so you can dim everything down if you don't want it to be quite as bright or you can make everything super breaks like that all right so I've made everything nice and orange for the time being of course if you don't want it just to be static you can apply a breathing effect which will cause it to slowly fade in or out can't modify the breeding affect breathing effect so what you see right now is what you get for whatever color you might do you have a strobing effect which I hate I don't know what I mean I guess it's another effect you can do but strobing just turns everything on and off that's super fun you can also choose color cycle which will cycle through colors so if you or once that RGB Ness going on then you can do that there's also a music effects ability which I do have some footage of although I'm not playing any music right now so it won't do anything but this will basically take your system audio and basically do some crazy effects with the RGB s4 that also this last one is CPU temperature which I thought was kind of interesting it will basically take your CPU temperature take a reading of your CPU temperature which right now is off a parent note does your CPU temperature and then it changes the the color so from green right now which is where it's at since it's idling then just put under load it'll turn yellow orange and red which I thought was also kind of neat anyway I'm gonna unsink these right now and let's put this back to just static for the main the main color on the motherboard and then let's go down to the header so you notice you can control the RGB LEDs on the motherboard or you can control just the RGB LEDs on the header this little button right here although it's not labeled you can click and it will pull up a little calibration tool so you can hit next it'll light up your strip and you just tell it what color you're seeing so that's red that's blue and not green so Tillet that's blue and then that's green and that will do some basic calibration which I thought was useful since there are multiple types of RGB LED strips out there and then of course if you just want to independently control the RGB strip by itself you can do that here with all of the same color and temperature affects that I showed you just a moment to go I'm gonna hit sync again and sync them both up and that pretty much does it for our demonstration of the RGB LED options in conclusion the things that I like about this motherboard are it is undeniably sexy and attractively designed I try to be a function over form person first but I know a lot of people are going to buy this board just because of how it looks the LED lighting is definitely done right it is flexible there's the expansion available and it's not muddied by other non changeable colors on the board I also think that it's pretty much got everything you can possibly want in a Z 170 board especially if you're overclocking in water cooling with the sole exception of storage freaks out there who want multiple m dot two slots with lots of hard drives attached as for things I don't like I was initially a little dismayed that the power and reset LEDs lit up white and don't change with the rest of the RGB colors on the board however you can go into the UEFI and disable these which is a nice feature that q code red LED readout does not turn off though and it would be nice to be able to do that this is a minor complaint however I've already mentioned my disappointment with the m dot 2 support and the storage configuration but again for most people this won't be a problem and look to x99 if you really really want lots of extra storage peripheral connectivity I also felt that for the price it would have been nice to get a high end accessory or two in the box we don't necessarily need the OC panel because that's pretty hardcore but a PCIe m dot two riser card would be nice or an Asus fan hub maybe finally for $400 you get a pretty sweet motherboard but I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the m8 F is no faster than any other z170 board out there that might cost half the price two hundred bucks or less at least when it comes to the fundamentals like CPU and memory speed so this is definitely a board for enthusiasts with deeper pockets or those who are willing to take out a small loan or sell a kidney which would totally be worth it that is all for this review though if you enjoyed it don't forget to hit that like button and also you can use my amazon link which is down in the description if you're shopping for stuff for yourself or for loved ones it's a great way to help me out feel free to visit my store at store dot paul's high road out net where you can support me about picking up a shirt 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