second most popular board and,
of course, the ROG motherboards
makes up more of the submissions
than all of any other vendor’s boards
combined.
Again, there’s nothing that speaks
better than the numbers, and they
are clear where overclocking is
concerned for this platform. Do you
yourself a favour and pick up the
Maximus X APEX or, if you can’t, the
Hero.
As with the Rampage, overclocking
this motherboard is rather
rudimentary, especially given that
you have profiles that you simply
load. Just with those alone and
Turbo V you can literally get to 6GHz+
easily. In fact, that’s precisely what
I did for this editorial. Wanting to
find out just how simple it was to
overclock the Core i7-8700K on this
motherboard, I simply loaded the
profile, dropped the temperature to
-120’C, and lo and behold 6GHz was
doable. It doesn’t get much easier
than this. After this point, it would be
a matter of finding the limits of the
CPU by increasing the multiplier as
appropriate.
Of course, there are memory
profiles as well which are key to
extracting any sort of competitive
result from the hardware. These
worked just as well as they did on
the Z270 Maximus IX APEX (actually
some of these could very well
be identical). For interest’s sake,
4,600MT/s (2,300MHz) is doable on
this motherboard even when using
an AIO cooler. Stability will take
a while to achieve, but for a quick
validation it’s rather easy with any
sort of functional memory kit.
For liquid nitrogen overclocking
though, one obviously seeks the
tightest timings possible and once
again C11 4133MHz ~ is doable,
pretty much matching what the Z270
motherboard could do and perhaps
making it a little simpler to achieve
this time around.
What INTEL has managed to do
with the Core i7-8700K and their
“14nm++” node is remarkable, and
to fully appreciate that one needs a
board such as the ROG MAXIMUS X
APEX. From where I stand, it’ll be
difficult if not near impossible for you
to find a more compelling duo - just
as it is with the Rampage VI APEX
and the Core i97980XE.
With the overclocking component
market as it is, I don’t think I’d
be mistaken in saying that we
effectively have a single horse race.
Fortunately, that hasn’t lowered the
quality of the motherboards in any
discernible way - in fact I’d wager
that these two are the best INTEL
platform boards ROG has produced
to date.
I’m not here to tell you what to
buy for your friendly or competitive
overclocking, but if you were to
opt for a different combination
of components, I can effectively
guarantee that you’d be starting at a
disadvantage. No product is perfect,
and neither are these two boards
along with the matching CPUs. They
do come dangerously close though,
and as far as these two platforms
are concerned, this is about as
perfect as you’re likely to ever get.
[ The OverClocker ]
Issue 43 | 2018 The OverClocker 23