ASUS ROG X570 Crosshair VIII Extreme Review

Conclusion

One of the things we’ve mentioned a lot in recent years is how consistent hardware manufacturers have become in ensuring that, with some natural exceptions, it almost doesn’t matter which model you choose in performance terms as they’re all the same. The differences are very much about the feature set instead. The extras. Once upon a time companies with that weren’t so performance orientated instead offered you a plentiful choice of features to make up for that performance whilst the ROG and similar high-end products were all about squeezing every last ounce of performance from your hardware.

The majority of our CPU testing was initially performed on the very capable Crosshair VIII Formula, and what we have seen throughout today’s testing is that the initial ‘best’ ASUS X570 motherboard was already able to extract all our Ryzen processors had to offer. Thus whilst the Crosshair VIII Extreme has a slightly improved set of power controls as befits a flagship model, our Ryzen processors were already at their peak capabilities. Unless you’ve got a golden “silicon lottery” processor then the Extreme is unlikely to give you more than you might otherwise get.

ASUS also seem to understand all of this consistency of performance as a general concept, and the Crosshair VIII Extreme is designed to bring all of the features and connection options to you. It might not echo the Extreme performance boost of the old Rampage II days, but in terms of Extreme features it’s the absolute boss and deserving of that Extreme moniker.

Certainly if what you want is a motherboard which is capable of giving you all the performance your hardware can, but also do so by giving you high bandwidth USB ports by the dozen, plentiful high speed M.2 slots, Thunderbolt support and, most impressively, 10Gb LAN. That alone is very much worth bearing in mind when you’re looking at the purchase cost of the Crosshair VIII Extreme. A cheap, made in China via Amazon 10Gb LAN card is going to run you £100, and one that you’d actually want to own is nearer £200. To get one included on the Extreme, and one that comes with all the quality one expects from an ASUS Republic of Gamers product, is worthy of the price of admission alone.

If you go in to the Crosshair VIII Extreme expecting massive performance gains then you’ll be disappointed, but if you go in hoping to get everything you can from your hardware and also have a motherboard replete with every high-bandwidth connection option currently available, you’ll be delighted. It’s a product deserving of the famous ROG Extreme branding and the ASUS Crosshair VIII Extreme wins our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

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