Review Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme Review: Move Over, Formula

[Admin]

The Crosshair VIII Extreme is a well-rounded flagship-class board, offering robust power delivery for overclocking, five total M.2 slots, Thunderbolt 4, a premium audio codec and more. But its $799.99 price will be out of reach for many.

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme Review: Move Over, Formula : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Why is it it took an $800 motherboard for ASUS to put more than 2 M.2 slots on it?

 

[helper800]

Why is it it took an $800 motherboard for ASUS to put more than 2 M.2 slots on it?

Because ASUS wants your money and thats one of the many ways they feature starve their lower end products as motivation to spend 800 on this.

 

[Co BIY]

$800 to run at most an $800 processor. (admiring whistle)

I don't see the value but I know I'm not the target audience.

5 x M.2 sounds great to me although 3x is probably more realistic for my budget. The Add-in-board is very interesting.

LEDs to color code the audio jacks on the rear IO should be replicated for all jacks on the rear IO of even low end boards.
It should cost very little and could probably be done with minimal added cost. Every cheap toy has rear lit LEDs. It would make finding the proper port when working behind or under a desk much easier. Much more useful than 16,000 color RGB strips.

 

[helper800]

$800 to run at most an $800 processor.

I don't see the value but I know I'm not the target audience.

Agreed. Then again people were / are spending 2500-3000 dollars on a 3090 to "play games" on a 1080p monitor so what do we know about value.

 

[escksu]

Why is it it took an $800 motherboard for ASUS to put more than 2 M.2 slots on it?

There isn't much point in having more than 2 slots. IF you think you can run 5 slots at PCIE 4.0 x 4 speeds, well you can't.

 

[escksu]

Take note of the M.2 slots. You cannot run all of them at full PCIE 4.0 speeds. Let me say why:

1. Only the first slot is connected to the CPU directly and the rest is via chipset. Ryzen has total of 24 PCIE 4.0 lanes, 16 for GPU, 4 for M.2 and 4 for chipset.

2. CPU has ONLY 4 x PCIE 4.0 lanes to the chipset. Yes, this means everything that is connected to the chipset goes through these 4 lanes to the CPU including those 4 M.2 slots. So, if you populate all those 4 slots with PCIE 4.0 SSD, you will be severely bottlenecked by the chipset.

 

[elementalRealms]

Take note of the M.2 slots. You cannot run all of them at full PCIE 4.0 speeds. Let me say why:

1. Only the first slot is connected to the CPU directly and the rest is via chipset. Ryzen has total of 24 PCIE 4.0 lanes, 16 for GPU, 4 for M.2 and 4 for chipset.

2. CPU has ONLY 4 x PCIE 4.0 lanes to the chipset. Yes, this means everything that is connected to the chipset goes through these 4 lanes to the CPU including those 4 M.2 slots. So, if you populate all those 4 slots with PCIE 4.0 SSD, you will be severely bottlenecked by the chipset.

It is all bout adding more storage , not running them all at the same time. No one needs to run 5 SSD storages at the same time reading and writing ... This is not a Server motherboard. You will not be bottlenecked at all in real usage .. you will be accessing one SSD or two maximum at the same time only. Some people miss the reason behind more M2 slots on a gaming motherbard , which is : ADDING MORE STORAGE.

 

[Upacs]

how much did you say?

 

[Upacs]

It is all bout adding more storage , not running them all at the same time. No one needs to run 5 SSD storages at the same time reading and writing ... This is not a Server motherboard. You will not be bottlenecked at all in real usage .. you will be accessing one SSD or two maximum at the same time only. Some people miss the reason behind more M2 slots on a gaming motherbard , which is : ADDING MORE STORAGE.

you can buy a pcie expansion card to add extra nvme drives if you have to. I bought one a while ago for an old board that doesn't have any... two slots, cost at much as a couple of beers in a bar in town. Asus is clearly pulling a fast one for those with more money than sense, and why not I guess

[edit: fixed typo]

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

There isn't much point in having more than 2 slots. IF you think you can run 5 slots at PCIE 4.0 x 4 speeds, well you can't.

Which is why 3 of them run at 3.0 and is perfectly fine outside of a datacenter, but it's not just about speed, it's about future compatibility. PCIe 4, DDR4, and Ryzen 5000 series CPUs are plenty fast for the next many years. If you're going to spend the money on any X570(S) motherboard these days, which aren't exactly sub $200 like AMD boards used to be, you should want as many M.2 connectors as possible so when cabled SATA finally dies, you have the slots available and don't have to use adapter cards which may kill your GPU PCIe slot speed.

Also with the again falling prices of M.2 drives so that 1TB models are now being found under $100 and even under $90 in some cases, combined with the ease of software RAID in Windows 10, with a minimal to no increase over the same capacity in SATA you have a much tidier case and higher speed.

 

[elementalRealms]

you can buy a pcie expansion card to add extra nvme drives if you have to. I bought one a while ago for an old board that doesn't have any... two slots, cost at much as a couple of beers in a bar in town. Asus is clearly pulling a fast one for those with more money than sense, and why not I guess

[edit: fixed typo]

You will need empty 4 lanes slots for that and it is very rare in cheap motherboards . you will be lucky to have more than one.

 

[escksu]

Which is why 3 of them run at 3.0 and is perfectly fine outside of a datacenter, but it's not just about speed, it's about future compatibility. PCIe 4, DDR4, and Ryzen 5000 series CPUs are plenty fast for the next many years. If you're going to spend the money on any X570(S) motherboard these days, which aren't exactly sub $200 like AMD boards used to be, you should want as many M.2 connectors as possible so when cabled SATA finally dies, you have the slots available and don't have to use adapter cards which may kill your GPU PCIe slot speed.

Also with the again falling prices of M.2 drives so that 1TB models are now being found under $100 and even under $90 in some cases, combined with the ease of software RAID in Windows 10, with a minimal to no increase over the same capacity in SATA you have a much tidier case and higher speed.

SATA will still be around even after X570 becomes obsolete......

 

[escksu]

It is all bout adding more storage , not running them all at the same time. No one needs to run 5 SSD storages at the same time reading and writing ... This is not a Server motherboard. You will not be bottlenecked at all in real usage .. you will be accessing one SSD or two maximum at the same time only. Some people miss the reason behind more M2 slots on a gaming motherbard , which is : ADDING MORE STORAGE.

You clearly have no idea what RAID is....

 

[elementalRealms]

You clearly have no idea what RAID is....

You clearly have no idea that RAID for modern Gen4 nvme SSD will not give you more performance in a gaming machine ... RAID for NVME SSD is for Servers and Data centers.

 

[geogan]

Did I read it only has 6x SATA connectors?

I may be imagining things but I seem to have 8xSATA on my current ROG Crosshair VIII Hero I use right now - and they are definitely all in use!
As well as all the NVME slots (2x PCIE 4.0 SSD )

So I don't think i could use this to upgrade even if i wanted to.

I'm also confused reading that about all the diferent types of these new slot SSDs - didn't realise there was also PCE and SATA versions - I have no idea what versions mine are (i just looked - they are Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 M2 SSDs) or what would have happened if I bought the wrong ones (SATA type is it???),.... same with all the USB standards... way too many variations of standards these days - its crazy confusing

Also is this taller than the ROG Crosshair VIII Hero? I just look in my full tower case (coolermaster HAF) and the bottom of board is level with EVGA 750 G3 power supply! So no room for longer board even in my big case.

 

[Upacs]

You will need empty 4 lanes slots for that and it is very rare in cheap motherboards . you will be lucky to have more than one.

I'm not sure what you mean by "cheap motherboards", but in the context of this $800 piece, I guess anything else qualifies. My recently purchased Asus TUF Gaming B550M-Plus Wi-Fi has spare 4 lane slot, and I paid less than 1/6 th the price of this board.

 

[elementalRealms]

I'm not sure what you mean by "cheap motherboards", but in the context of this $800 piece, I guess anything else qualifies. My recently purchased Asus TUF Gaming B550M-Plus Wi-Fi has spare 4 lane slot, and I paid less than 1/6 th the price of this board.

A spare 4 lanes slot will give you just one more SSD

 

[Upacs]

A spare 4 lanes slot will give you just one more SSD

Eeeeer, what? you can get 4x nvme cards on a 4 lane PCIe x16 slot

 

[blkspade]

Nothing exists that can take advantage of PCIe5, and there is no real world advantage for the vast majority of people for NVME beyond 3.0. SATA SSD are fine for the most part. 5 NVME on X570 is asinine, because you'll never get the proper combined speed of them all. You get to a point where raw space over rules speed thus raided mechanical drives will be absolutely fine. There is no realistic use case in a consumer platform for that much nvme. Best/Worse case scenario is a regular need to transfer large files externally over that thunderbolt 4 interface, which also has to contend with that limited PCIe bandwidth. If you need a ridiculous amount of storage, you should be planning for some kind of redundancy. A massive raid 0 is stupid, and do you really want to rely on MS software raid? It's already a full ATX board, that's going in a relatively big case. You can run Truenas Core in Hyper-V on Win10 Pro (or Proxmox) with a 4 drive Raid-Z1 and get 700-900MBps. Basically nearly maxing out that 10Gbps nic, because there is nothing you're doing locally that actually needs a mass amount of storage to be any faster. You could otherwise have 1 or 2 4-8TB NVME 4.0 to run the system off of.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

That's not true.

While nothing may yet be able to fully saturate the PCIe 5.0 x16 bandwidth, it means that fewer lanes are required to maintain PCIe 4 and earlier speeds which allows for greater flexibility, as there's no need for 16 lanes and in some cases even 8 lanes to prevent a bottleneck. Don't know if you're old enough to remember the dark days of PCIe 2.0 and darker days of PCIe 1.x where bandwidth was a real issue and x16 was a requirement.

Also, NVMe is the format of the future, and with falling prices of M.2 form factor drives in combination with their increasing speeds and endurance levels along with the ease of spanning a volume across multiple drives, having numerous NVMe M.2 slots is as important today as having 6-8 SATA slots was a decade ago, and there is the possibility of being able to attach multiple drives to a single NVMe in the future, in which case the large bandwidth afforded by it will come in very useful.

 

[cgcomer]

I noticed the specs on this board say it supports Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series, but the ASUS website is a little confusing and the article doesn't clarify.
The ASUS website says the following:

Rear USB: Total 10 ports

Total 10 ports
AMD Ryzen™ 5000, 5000 G-Series, 4000 G-Series and 3000 Series Desktop Processors
4 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (4 x Type-A)
AMD Ryzen™ 3000 G-Series, 2000 Series and 2000 G-Series Desktop Processors
4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports (4 x Type-A)
AMD X570 chipset
2 x Thunderbolt™ 4 port(s) (2 x USB Type-C®) with up to 5V/3A, 15W charging support
4 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (4 x Type-A)

Total 10 ports
1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 connector(s) (support(s) USB Type-C®, PD 3.0 up to DC 5V/3A 60W fast charging technology)*
1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Front Panel connector(s) (support(s) USB Type-C®)
2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 header(s) support(s) additional 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports
2 x USB 2.0 header(s) support(s) additional 4 USB 2.0 ports

Does this mean that the Thunderbolt 4 ports only function as Thunderbolt 4 under 5000 series chipsets only, or will 3000 and 4000 series support these speeds as well? Or does it mean that the 15W charging is only available under 5000 series, but 3000 & 4000 can support the data speeds.
Personally, I don't have a need for using Thunderbolt 4 for displays, but the data speeds combined with an external hub like a Caldigit or OWC would allow me to connect some external audio gear with minimal latency until I can justify a USB interface/patchbay.