ASUS unveils Crosshair VIII Extreme motherboard with Thunderbolt 4

ASUS introduces its high-end ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme motherboard. This X570 motherboard has passive chipset cooling and two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports. The company has not yet announced a release date or suggested retail price.

The ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme gets an E-ATX form factor. The motherboard features, among other things, a passively cooled X570 chipset, although the chipset is not referred to as X570S; other motherboard manufacturers do introduce their passively cooled X570 motherboards with an S suffix. The Crosshair VIII Extreme also has a VRM design with 18+2 stages. The motherboard supports Ryzen 2000 CPUs and newer, including Ryzen G processors with integrated GPUs.

ASUS provides the Crosshair VIII Extreme, among other things, with five M.2 slots with PCIe 4.0 x4 interfaces. Users do need a Ryzen 3000 or Ryzen 5000 processor to use the PCIe 4.0 standard. Three M.2 slots use PCIe lanes from the CPU, the other two are connected to the chipset and are connected via the included ROG DIMM.2 expansion card from ASUS, which resembles a memory module and can accommodate the two additional M.2 SSDs.

Furthermore, the motherboard has two PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and a PCIe 3.0 x1 connection. The latter is connected to the chipset. ASUS also equips the model with a Realtek ALC4082 audio chipset with an ESS Saber 9018Q2C combo chip with dac and amplifier.

In terms of connectivity, the motherboard features six USB 3.2 Gen 2 type A ports and two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support. Those two Thunderbolt 4 ports also support DisplayPort 1.4 and Thunderbolt outputs for video. The motherboard also has two separate DisplayPort inputs and two RJ45 connections, respectively for 10Gbit and 2.5Gbit Ethernet. The motherboard comes with a WiFi module for WiFi 6E.