Asus Maximus VIII Ranger Z170 Motherboard Review

A kick ass board for the gamer on a budget. Surprisingly, for being the lowest tier ROG Board, it’s not missing any features!

Lets start off with the box. As always with an ROG box, it’s rather good looking, and hidden under the flap at the front is pretty much all the information you’d need to decide you need this board in your life.

Inside the box you’ll find:

• Manual
• DVD with drivers and utilities (I actually had to use this! First time I’ve used a DVD drive in years!)
• 4 SATA Cables
• CPU Installation tool
• ROG Door hanger
• Case badge, 3 ROG stickers and cable label stickers (say ‘Cable Label’ out loud. It’s oddly satisfying.)
• A ‘deliberately plain’ padded I/O shield
• and an SLI Bridge

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And the board of course. One thing that is on that table that won’t come in your box, is the Intel i5-6600K, which we have already reviewed. That’ll be the chip I’m testing with.

The board itself has quite a nice overall aesthetic, with the usual tricks, and a few new cool ones too! Let’s take a closer look below.

Starting from the top you’ll find the 8 pin EPS power connector, CPU Fan and CPU optional fan header, as well as one labelled for a Watercooling Pump – which is cool! You’ll get a MEM OK! button, and a dual seven segment display for debug codes, and of course the cool looking power phase heatsink. Next up is the 4 Dual channel DDR4 RAM slots, and the LGA 1151 socket in the center – which, to note, will not support 1150 chips, so no backwards compatibility as far as I’m aware.

Down the bottom you will find the split PCB section for the Supreme FX audio, the one PCI-E gen 3 x16 lane, and the two x8 lanes, along with the three x1 lanes (totalling 35 lanes). You’ll also get a thunderbolt header, hardware power, reset and CMOS clear buttons, a TPM header, ROG extension connector for the overclocking tool (uses one of the two USB 2 headers), another of the two USB3 headers, and the front panel I/O headers. Don’t forget the sexy-as-hell chipset heatsink and the extra long M.2 slot! Also, to note, this board has 2 SATA Express ports, which if not in use, make for 6 6Gb/s SATA ports.

Just to see the difference in the chips/socket, you can see at the bottom of this chip, the area that should be left blank is populated with connectors.

I just had to put this in, that heatsink is beautiful.

Anyway, onto the rear I/O! You’ll get a PS/2 Mouse&Keyboard combo port, 2 USB 2 ports, another CMOS clear button, an HDMI port, a DisplayPort (full size), a USB 3.1 type A and a type C, along with two USB 3.0 ports, Intel NIC and 7.1 audio with SPDIF.

Again, just wanted to throw these in as this is one awesome looking heatsink too.

Just to point out, the split PCB section for the audio lights red when plugged in – pretty cool looking!

Just to mention the BIOS quickly, since I’m not overly used to too many BIOSes, it took me a while to find everything, but once I did I found I really liked it – with the hardware monitor on the right, and all the settings in tabs above.
In the video I promised more detail on AI  Suite – so here it is. I use AI suite 2 on my own PC, but this one is definitely a step up! No only do you get one-click overclocking tools, fan speed/curves, but a whole host of other cool things – such as KeyBot II. Now, that sounds like it’s just a keylogger, but don’t worry – it isn’t. Sort of. It is a dedicated chip on the board that allows you to hit enter to turn the PC on, or if you are overclocking and mess something up, just type C L R while the PC is off, and that will clear the BIOS! Pretty awesome right?

So that’s pretty much it here. I spend plenty of time yelping about the pro’s and con’s of the board, but to simplify it down, it’s great. It’s fairly stylish, has all the features you could want – and nothing missing as far as I can tell, and does the job with a pretty reasonable price tag. No bad – hence why it’s getting the gamer approved award!