ASUS ROG MAXIMUS VIII GENE LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI USB 3.1 Micro ATX Intel Gaming Motherboard

Pros: Works great, everything as advertised. Love it. Overclocks so easily. LED lights on mobo are a nice touch. Plenty of accessories in the box--the Whetsone is my favorite accessory. Oh and, it's fast. Fast and cool. Between the PCIe SSD, plenty of DDR4, and the i7-6700, it does everything, all at once, fast.

Cons: Mobo would not post until I put a new PSU on it--after that, all was well.

Overall Review: Rebate took 96 calendar days. Later, I bought another one. That next rebate took 253 days, or 8 months and 8 days. That's the amount of time it took NASA's Curiosity Rover to travel to Mars. It's also the length of time OJ Simpson's trial lasted. Supposedly, it's also the number of days Hans Gruber took to plan his first (and last) heist. The mart of Wal predicts the Christmas season will last 253 days by the year 2025. Good luck with your rebate!

Pros: Easy to set up, fast, many overclocking features, XMP setup for RAM, updated bios is fine, RAID works (Stripe with 3SSDs), Running my CAS 10 DDR4 just fine, overclock profiles can be stored in bios, reset button on the board, hosts everything I have with no crashes

Cons: What's funny here is the BIOS wins awards and stuff, but I found it to have some odd navigation, particularly when subscreens inside a tab remember what screen you were on, and the only way to know you're not on the main tab again is press escape and see if the screen changes (i.e. it took me a minute to find the sata config because I was already in a screen that was "past" it inside the tab). This could be resolved by using a breadcrumb of sort.

Overall Review: Get the latest BIOS, right now it's 1001.

I made this review because I see some odd negative ones... I get that a board can be bad and should be RMA'd, but some actually worried me that there was a "bad batch" going around, and it was right when I was ordering, but mine is fine.

The reports of the "computer restarting and showing the bios screen multiple times" is actually just the flow of the startup, it shows the ROG screen 2x because in the middle it shows an intermediate screen. Even I first thought it was "restarting", but it wasn't.

Auto overclocking actually worked for me, but I wanted to fine tune it a bit so I don't use it.


UPDATE : Multiple 3d games started to crash with a hard system lock. I have changed everything but the motherboard, processor, and drives. I ordered another non ASUS motherboard as a replacement after ASUS did not respond within a few days to my RMA request. I sent them another followup asking if they have received my RMA request, and it's been 9 days now and nothing... I had rated this motherboard 5 stars, and now I rate ASUS as 1 star.