Design
The motherboard is truly a massive board and the E-ATX standard and will need special consideration by users to find a properly sized case for it.
The quality of the motherboard is top notch and the board is very heft and feels very durable. The layout of the board is great with very nice PCI-E spacing for those who want to run multiple GPU setups. For those who want to overclock the board on a bench table the on-board buttons being in the top right area of the board make it very easy to use without the need for attaching buttons. The CPU power delivery is an 8-phase design that has proven to be more than capable by extreme overclockers who have abused these boards over and over. The inclusion of ten USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports on the rear panel is great for those users who have a massive amount of external devices to hook up. The Gigiabit Ethernet is taken care of by an Intel I218-V, and the 802.11 AC is also taken care of by an Intel solution as well.
The SupremeFX audio sounded very good for onboard audio and it was amped more than enough to provide excellent loud audio with some more demanding headphones from my collection. This is likely due to Asus including its SonicSense amp that can automatically sense the headphones impedance and adjust the amp automatically to provide a superior experience with a users chosen headphone or headset. Asus also included in the design some premium Japanese-mad ELNA capacitors to help provide high-quality sound. A very unique feature that was found on this board was that of the Sonic SoundStage hardware switch that will cycle through audio profiles via a hardware button. This definitely unique feature has profiles are for FPS, racing, fighting and sports. The audio was great for playing games such as Battlefield 4 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, though for music critical listeners will find that an external DAC and AMP are still preferable. The integrated ROG USB Truevolt design should also mean that those who do use an external USB DAC will have lower noise and a stable 5v supply from the USB connectors. The whole audio portion of the board is physically separated on the PCB to provide proper isolation from interference that could happen.
There is also a feature called Game First III for networking that works much like Qualcomm’s Killer solution. It allows the users to prioritize apps or games to give preferential bandwidth or priority to maximize performance. This is especially useful to gamers or people using applications that will function better if they have a better connection. This definitely will also be useful to those who torrent often so that it can be set up to not choke out other apps that compete for the bandwidth.
