ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Extreme and ROG Matrix GTX 980 Ti Platinum Pictured

The upcoming ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard is powered by the latest Intel Z170 chipset and looks great thanks to the new Titanium Armor & Plasma Copper ROG color scheme. The Maximus VIII Extreme board comes with the ASUS ROG 10Gb/s Ethernet add-on card, so it will be one of the first desktop motherboards released that is able to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet right from the start! 10GbE is ten times faster the good old 1 Gigabit that you’re likely using right now. The move to 10GbE will be slow, but as demand for high bandwidth networks is increasing as people are collecting an ever-growing amount of data and are looking to speed up networked tasks like full system backups. StarTech came out with a 10 GbE add-in PCIe card last year that can be purchased today for $239.99 shipped, so it’s nice to see ASUS bundling a card with the board and it will help drive the network card prices down.

This ‘Extreme’ ATX board also features the ASUS ROG SupremeFX Hi-Fi audio solution that consists of an ESS ES9018K2M digital-to-audio converter (DAC) for lower audio jitter, two Texas Instruments LM4562 operational amplifiers for superior audio signal amplification and finally a TPA6120A2 headphone amplifier. The board is also loaded up with four PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slots, eight SATA III 6Gbps ports, 802.11ac wireless + Bluetooth 4.0 and of course a SFF-8639 U.2 32 Gb/s header for that NVMe drive you know you want. We expect general and overclocking performance to be on par or better than the current high-end Z170 boards from ASUS and it is due out before the holiday. The suggested retail price has yet to be announced.

ASUS also showed off their ROG Matrix GTX 980 Ti Platinum gaming graphics card that has an identical color scheme to the board we just talked about. This card has the usual ASUS DirectCU II GPU cooler and was manufactured using the ASUS AUTO-Extreme process with Super Alloy Power II components. It differs from some of the other NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards though by having a memory defroster for extreme overclockers and a button that restores the vBIOS if you get a little too nutty with your overclocking attempts.

Here are a few images that show off a rather interesting case mod that was created by Ali Abbas that shows these new products together!