ASUS Z170 Maximus VIII Impact MITX Review

Test Setup

ASUS Maximus VIII Impact
Intel Core i7-6700K
2666MHz Memory
3600MHz Memory
nVidia GTX980
Corsair AX1500i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 10 

Overclocking

The million dollar question is always going to be the overclocking performance and whether the decision to move the power phases to a vertical board, thus allowing ASUS to install more, has any end product. The answer unquestionably is yes. We managed to get 3600MHz memory working with a simple flick of the XMP option in the BIOS, something which other manufacturers are still struggling with. 48×100 was very easy to get running so we then moved on to search for our 24×200 bench clock. Gradually working our way up as we do it took little time to get the overclock dialled in and stable, at no point was there any wobbles of glitches that made us think we were using an ITX board over a full sized ATX. This might be a motherboard smaller than your mouse mat but with a 4.8GHz overclock based on a 200BCLK on our 6700K and 3600MHz DDR4 with all of the voltages pulled in tight there is enough performance here to undoubtedly be worthy of the Impact forming part of the Maximus VIII range.