Asus announces Maximus VIII board with separate 10Gbit/s Ethernet card

Asus has announced a new Maximus motherboard and the Matrix version of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. The motherboard comes with an expansion card that enables Ethernet connections at up to 10Gbit/s.

The Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard supports, among other things, 5-Way Optimization software for automatic overclocking and Pro Clock to boost the clock speed. In addition, the DDR4 memory can be overclocked with the T-Topology software.

The board with Intel’s Z170 chipset offers space for four DDR4 memory bars, four PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots and a PCI-E 3.0 x1 slot. There are two sata express connections and eight sata 600 interfaces. There is also an m2 socket for SSDs and a u2 variant for storage media in that form factor. In addition to the internal Intel I219-V gigabit card, Asus provides the RoG 10G Express expansion card, which could provide Ethernet speeds of theoretically 10Gbit/s. Furthermore, the motherboard must rely on its audio qualities; an ESS ES9018K2M dac is available for this, among other things. Asus also includes an external TPA6120A2 headphone amplifier.

Also new from Asus is the RoG Matrix 980 Ti. The manufacturer equips the video card with its DirectCU II cooling and a fourteen-phase power supply. The card is delivered overclocked. The base clock is 1190MHz in game mode and 1216MHz in OC mode. The boosted speeds are 1291MHz in game mode and 1317MHz in OC mode; By default, the GTX 980 Ti runs at 1000MHz and has a boost clock of 1075MHz.

The gddr5 memory has an effective speed of 7200MHz; with the reference card of the GTX 980 Ti it is 7010MHz. Asus has provided the card with a dual-link DVI interface, HDMI 2.0 and three displayport 1.2 connections. The suggested retail price of the Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard is 569 euros, that of the Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum is 849 euros.