Reviews Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Formula Review

£600 top end board with integrated waterblocks, but doesn't actually contact the part of the board that otherwise needs a fan on it.

Go home Asus, you're drunk.

 

No.
Just no.

 

This is exactly what I thought! Finally a proper reason to have integrated watercooling and they don't do it!

 

That'll be on the $999 AsRock limited production run halo product x570 mobo.
(sadly I'm not even joking)

 

I look at the Zenith X399 release and I thought it wasn't actually that bad price wise. I mean, you got *so much*.

This though? meh.

 

While I agree £600 is too much for this, lets not forget why they can get away with it:
£750 3950x + £600 mobo + £200 32GB RAM = Still cheaper than just an i9-9960x alone.

 

Which one? Do you have a link?

 

AsRock X570 Aqua:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14161/the-amd-x570-motherboard-overview/3

 

Shame its so silver really.

 

£600.

No 10GbE. No parallel 24-pin ATX. Annoying slot layout. Stupid heatsink design/layout.

I want to like it, but the above ruin it.

 

Surely BT can get their hands on this board for a full review, even if its just 10 pages of phwoar. Its great to see EFI/BIOS screenshots with these reviews. I remember years ago deciding which mobo to buy based on the review of the BIOS/EFI. This was back when sometimes motherboards would use voltage offsets or odd names for important quantities.

 

Just noticed this. They could have at the very least run a heatpipe down from the VRM portion of the waterblock on the right hand side. Would have probably been enough to then run passive cooling on the chipset.

Oh you say voltage offsets. The Foxconn P45 board I am currently messing around with (Thanks again Zoon!) doesn't use an offset or direct input.. No, instead it uses a random number between 0 and 64 to denote what the offset would be. It is currently set to 8... what that is I have no idea! Might be good or it might be waaaaaay too much!. Other than that the board itself feels much more modern that its contemporary 780i SLI from XFX. At least it has all solid caps!

 

Two reasons it probably won't happen:
Bit-tech hasn't reviewed an AsRock mobo in like half a decade.
The X570 Aqua is just a plain silly product... I mean lets face it, why would AsRock send out review samples of that to anyone? A mainstream mobo for a grand is just going to get slagged off anyway.
If it was a X599 board for Zen 2 Ripper to take the p*ss out of the ROG Dominus that would be a different story.

 

Why is it that all the USB type C holes on the IO cover are just regular USB size? I assumed it was a cost thing, but on a board that costs £600 I'd expect the IO cover to fit nicely around the type c port, am I missing something?

 

Keyboard, mouse, phone, printer, controller, headset, external blu ray drive and usb stick is 8? That still leaves 3 spare on the back plus 2 - 4 on the front?

 

21 ports, once all the headers are accounted for [iirc]... how many do you think you need?

It's the mid-low-end boards where they're stingy af on ports.

For anyone who wants to check my maths -

12 [11x Type-A, 1x Type C] on the rear i/o
4 from the 2x USB 3.0 headers
4 from the 2x USB 2.0 headers
1 from the USB 3.1 header [at least i think you only get 1x Type-C port from it]

 

Was it just me that took the ports comment as sarcasm then?