R E V I E W // R O G M A X I M U S X I A P E X
TESTING CONFIGURATION
INTEL Core i7 8700K @ 6GHz
G.Skill Trident F4 DDR4 3200 C14 @ 4133 C12
WD BLUE 250Gb SSD
CORSAIR AX1500i
Windows 7 x64
(BIOS 0905)
OC GEAR AWARD
HARDWARE AWARD
ROG MAXIMUS XI APEX
ERP $468.22 | WEBSITE ROG.A SUS.COM
A
nother year brings us another
APEX board. Much like all the
others with the APEX
designation, this is a pure overclocking
board by all accounts. Sure enough
you find the gamer friendly stuff, but
these have become ubiquitous features
which we all expect at anything close
to this price.
That said, nothing prevents one from
using the APEX XI as a daily driver,
perhaps after it has been retired as
your extreme overclocking platform.
Before all of this however, what I’m
here to share are my experiences
with the MAXIMUS XI APEX in two
distinct environments. Everyday
computing and obviously, how it does
in overclocking.
Firstly, however, let’s get through
20 The OverClocker Issue 47 | 2019
the mundane and run through all the
features which are of interest here.
At a glance the board appears to be a
standard ATX motherboard with two
DIMM slots (the third slot is a DIMM.2
slot for NVMe storage) and a sparse
selection of PCI-Express slots. It has
all the usual features you’d expect,
such as a total of nine USB 3.1 Type-A
ports of which three are Gen2, a single
USB 3.1 Type-C port, Gigabit Ethernet,
wireless antenna connectors (the Z390
chipset includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth),
PS/2 ports for both keyboard and
mouse for extreme overclocking, and
7.1 audio with optical out.
Expansion slots are taken care of by
two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, one
PCI-Express 3.0 x4 and one x1 slot.
Storage is what you’d expect of a
consumer grade board, with six SATA
3.0 ports and M.2 taken care of by the
DIMM.2 expansion card.
Aesthetically, the board looks much
like a gaming board. It even has RGB
lighting and an RGB header. Sadly,
the unique PCB shape of older APEX
boards is a thing of the past, as it now
sports the standard rectangular
design. All of these features mean that
other than being a board for extreme
overclocking, it can also be used as a
daily driver.
On the motherboard power phase
layout. Several videos exist on-line
from AHOC, covering various aspects
of the power phases. If you’re
interested, you’d do well to check
these out. Especially if for some
reason you were under the impression