R E V I E W // R O G M A X I M U S X I A P E X
other applications. Most of them
offering functionality that’s available in
AI Suite in some form or another. That
said, this is still the better application
when it comes to motherboard
utilities. Most motherboard vendor
applications have substandard UI
and puzzling design choices. The
ROG software isn’t free of all such
infractions, but manages them so
you’re presented with a somewhat
accessible application. Functionality
is particularly impressive as there’s
22 The OverClocker Issue 47 | 2019
literally nothing you can’t monitor
or configure within AI suite on the
board. The Asus power bar proving to
be indispensable for convenient fan
profile switching.
DRY ICE
To truly test the limits of this board in
a remotely sensible way, one really
does need LN2. The issue here is that
this is not readily available at present,
but dry ice is always there 24/7. As
such, the overclocking performed is
not really indicative of any particular
characteristic of the board as such. It’s
much like trying to articulate the
difference between the road and track
versions of the same performance car
by driving to the local library. There’s
only so much you can tell, and that
much is the dry ice overclocking that I
did for this motherboard evaluation.
Using the Core i7-8700K,
overclocking was as you’d expect -
simple. In fact, it took significantly