ASUS ROG Maximus IX Extreme LGA1151 DDR4 DP HDMI M.2 Z270 EATX Motherboard with onboard AC Wifi

Simply the best motherboard on the market for max rendering. If you give it 1 star because some plastic is covering a port and you can't fix it. Then this motherboard is not for you. You will have problems every step of the way from from fit to wiring to cooling. Water cooling is never easy before starting a project know what you are getting into, if this is your first time remember that if you get a leak it's will destroy whatever it touches from the motherboard, ram, gpu's, to hard drives. So my best advice is plan ahead make sure you put a drain port use same company fittings never mix because they are all different. I personally like ek water cooling and thermaltake. If this is your first time don't use ridged tubing. Another peace of advice with liquid cooling don't use opaque coolant. It's just a powder it will destroy your waterblocks. More of a rant then a review. I've been doing this for quite some time. Liquid cooling is not a cheap easy thing. This board is the best for all statistics on speed and capabilities. For atleast 2 years you will not find a better board. Rog boards are only meant to have 2 gpu's not 3 due to the fact that it only has 2 16x pci slots the third is only 8x and no one makes a SLI bridge long enough for the 3rd port. Before putting all on gpu's make sure you attach all cables including sensors because some become covered.

So as long as you are a advanced PC cooling enthusiast, this product is amazing. I’ve been able to overclock my seventh GEN to 5.2 GHz and able to keep it up there very stable.

This board is amazing. The software Ai Suite is horrid. Do all fan changes in the BIOS(trust me) M.2 setup was super easy. Waterblock install was a bit hard. flipping the board over while trying to keep it lined up and not have the heatpads move was a good 15 min chore. Cables become a bit of a mess with CPU and waterblock ports being next to each other. Keep steady temps, even hitting 19C on some nights. using 2 slim 120mm rads. All in all. this board is amazing.And im not done at all. this board will last me at least 7 more years.

Perhaps I didn't do enough research, but I failed to realize that this particular motherboard must be attached to a DIY water-cooling system in your rig. It cannot work without internal water-cooling with additional pipes and water pump and all the necessary bits. So right now, this unit is useless to me until I can purchase all the extra water cooling items I need to connect to this motherboard. The unit itself is very good so I give myself only 3 stars for not doing enough research on the product but I also place some blame on ASUS for not advertising that in BOLD CAPITALS in the first place.

Awesome motherboard if it did'nt have a faulty IO shield design. I installed my processor, RAM, 2 samsung pro 1tb m.2 drives, and a hard line cooling loop. Booted up windows 10 and everything ran perfectly. I bought this motherboard specifically for the thunderbolt 3 built in and upon testing the thunberbolt port I was immediately dissapointed. The "pre-installed IO shield" leaves a big gap between the ports and any standard device that you plug in making the thunderbolt port completely unusable, unless you want to hold the plug while you are using the device. I drained the loop, removed the IO shield and everything works perfectly. I will be contacting ASUS about this issue and I hope that it gets fixed before someone else pays a premium price for a faulty device. I would also like to mention that I ignored the first hint that this IO shield design would be a problem, which is that the io shield got in the way when installing the mobo making it very difficult to screw the mobo down. In case anyone thinks that it might be a problem with my chassis, I am using a Lian-Li PC-O7S and it worked perfectly for my z-170 deluxe mobo.

I had difficulty getting this to boot at first. And when you're watercooling, that can mean a huge pain to drain and disassemble your entire loop and try to diagnose the problem. It eventually did boot up and has been running fine since but it was only after reading another customer review here that I realized it wasn't booting due to a false positive with the leak detection. If I continue to have this problem, I may need to RMA the board - another huge pain in the rear.As yet another reviewer has mentioned, I cannot use the USB 3.1 type C (aka, "Thunderbolt") port as my cable simply falls out due to the I/O shield being spaced just a hair too far from the port itself. Finally, I was unable to select either "DTS Interactive" or "Dolby Digital Live" for my 5.1 surround sound system using the built-in S/PDIF port. I contacted Asus support and they are supposedly looking into the issue; Thankfully, I found a modified version of the audio drivers which enabled this feature for me.I love the look of the board, the integrated monoblock saved me from having to purchase one separately, and the RGB lighting looks great. The board is rock solid stable (once it boots) and I've got my 7700K running at 4.9GHz at 1.35v with temperatures between 55°C - 60°C while gaming. Sadly, this is not compatible with Intel's new Coffee Lake processors (8600K, 8700K, etc.) as of this moment. Asus has stated that their ROG Z270 boards are capable of supporting the power delivery requirements for these processors if Intel allows it, so I'm holding out hope for a future BIOS update. If not, this is a dead platform. Hopefully Asus fixes the issues I mentioned above for next iteration of this board.Update: Customer Service finally responded to me regarding support for 5.1 channel audio. Per Asus, the board only lists "8 channel audio" support but does not officially support DTS/DDL - the only way to get true 5.1 audio. If I hadn't found the modified drivers, I would be returning this board.

I have had it for a few months now, its been perfect. Has everything an enthusiast board should have.