Intel Core I7 6700K Review, Skylake is Falling!

Sneak Peek At The Asus Maximus Hero VIII

We’ll be running a full review of the Maximus Hero VIII as soon as the Intel Core I7 6700K review is published, Tight deadlines on the I7 6700K prevent us from doing a full review right now. Five days with a new processor, on a new Chipset, on a new Operating system is insane and 3 sleepless days and 16 Monster Frozen Lime energy drinks later will attest to that.

Without our partners we wouldn’t be able to bring you the reviews so we wanted to thank Asus for dropping a sweet Maximus Hero VIII board on us for the launch of Skylakes enthusiast chip.

Featuring a little less gaudy look don’t let the Asus Hero VIII’s look fool you, this is a full-fledged ROG board born and bred, Being what e call the “Chicken and Egg” board which means the CPU designed for the board just released and as we review the board Asus and Intel are perfecting drivers, We found very few flaws in the board or the firmware and any minor bugs we found Asus and Intel quickly addressed,

The short list of obvious features for the Hero VIII are start and reset buttons along with a reset CMOS button, BIOS FlashBack, USB 3.1, USB 3, USB 2.0, 10 phase power to the CPU, long life caps and fine gold caps for the audio portion of the board. We honestly can’t tell you which was more exciting getting the 6700K or the Asus Hero VIII,

With 36 lanes of PCI-E blazing speed 16x of those 36 lanes come from the CPU itself so running 16x 16x Xfire or SLI shouldn’t be a problem but you’ll have to settle for 16x8x8x if you are running triple SLI or Xfire so keep that in mind when selecting your board. For most people 16x16x is plenty of GPU headroom because single card operation is still by far the most predominate GPU arrangement.

There’s a shot of the CPU area with the 6700K mounted in the LGA 1151 socket, as you notice the CPU cooler arrangement is vastly different from 2011v3 and the CPU coolers from its LGA 1150 predecessor will fit the new 1151 boards. You get a peek at the 10 chokes that filter the power and fed it to the CPU as well as the long life solid capacitors Asus loves to use.

We hate to say it bt there’s no way around it, the I/O plate of the Maximus Hero VIII is a little skimpy with three USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.1 Type C. On the I/O plate you also find the BIOS Flashback button, a PS2 keyboard / mouse connector, a HDMI and a Display port, the Intel Network Port and the usual sound outputs. With all that dead space there Asus could have wired up a few more USB 3.0 ports and at times we found ourselves shuffling USB devices around due to the sparsity of USB 3 on the I/O panel.

There’s a look at the fine gold caps used in the Supreme Audio setup, and another plastic shield covering a screw hole in the PCB.

Turning the corner from the audio you get a peek at the Start, reset and reset CMOS buttons and some headers we will cover in the actual review of the Hero VIII.

We wanted to peek at the PCI-E section of the board and you can see 3x 16x PCI-E slots and 3 PCI-E 1x slots,

In the last shot of the sneak peek we wanted to show you the 4 ram slots and so far all we’ve seen is the Maximus Hero VIII but being a Maximus board if there were more than 4 RAM slots available we would probably see them on the Hero. We are venturing a guess here but it looks like tha majority of boards will be 4 RAM slots so pick up as large a kit as you can so you don’t end up wasting the money on a smaller kit and replacing it later.