Asus Maximus VIII Hero Alpha Review

Overclocking, EFI and software

The other main players in the motherboard market have some fairly nifty software-based overclocking tools these days and Asus' AI Suite includes its Dual Intelligent Processors section that provides easy tweaking of the baseclock, multiplier and all the major voltages - certainly enough for us to max-out our Core i7-6700K at a reasonable 4.8GHz using a vcore of 1.33V - a low vcore compared to many boards we've seen, but sadly a tad short of the 4.9GHz we achieved with the Formula.

However, only Terragen was failing - even Prime95 was solid so given a day more tweaking, we have no doubt that this is a potent overclocking board that will only be limited by your cooling, and CPU of course, and we'd have no qualms about ditching the EFI for most of the tweaking and using Asus' software too.




The Aura RGB lighting software looks a lot like many peripheral-based suites we've seen, with several lighting effects plus the ability to pick from the full RGB colour pallet and to set the brightness, both for the onboard LED and for the two 4-pin headers.

The EFI meanwhile is up to Asus' usual high standards, with a clean and very detailed layout, plus extra useful features such as SSD secure erase and Q-Fan control. As you can see in the images below, you're able to tweak the fan profile curves of all the fan headers and even switch off case fans at certain temperatures too - something the competition usually lacks the ability to do.